The Peter Attia Drive - #199 - Running, overcoming challenges, and finding success

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.320 now, head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Ryan Hall. Ryan is a retired American long distance

00:00:54.780 runner who holds the US record in the half marathon at 59 minutes and 43 seconds, where

00:01:00.600 he became the first US runner to break the one hour barrier. He also holds the American record

00:01:05.400 in the marathon and is the only American to run sub 205 running 204.58. Ryan is generally regarded

00:01:13.500 as one of the greatest American distance runners. He retired in 2016 after a really difficult four

00:01:20.340 year period following the London Olympics, which was plagued by lots of injuries. And he's really

00:01:26.140 transformed his body in a way that is almost difficult to imagine without looking at a picture of him

00:01:32.620 then versus now. Ryan now is a coach. He coaches his wife, who is also a professional runner, and he

00:01:41.300 coaches runners of all categories and talent levels through his training program called Run Free Training.

00:01:48.180 He's written a book called Run the Mile You're In, which we talk about a little bit in this podcast,

00:01:53.160 but probably not as much as I would have liked to. We spend so much time talking about things here that

00:01:58.240 this is one of the few podcasts where I really felt like I came into it with kind of a sense of where I

00:02:03.740 wanted to go. And I completely came off that. I never really come into podcasts with a list of

00:02:09.080 questions, but I usually have a sense of direction. And here I deviated from it completely.

00:02:13.040 And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it just speaks to how much I couldn't

00:02:17.680 stop wanting to get into details of his training and how just intrigued I have been by his

00:02:25.860 transformation. When you look at Ryan today, he's an enormous physical specimen, probably over 190

00:02:31.280 pounds, powerlifting, going on carrying all these extreme feats of physical strength, some of which

00:02:37.060 we talk about, but many of which you can see on his Instagram account. And I can't recommend that

00:02:41.140 highly enough. It's just amazing to watch. For example, his last one was doing a 500 pound

00:02:46.600 deadlift and then immediately running into a five minute mile. He didn't succeed in that. I think

00:02:51.220 he went 522 or something, but he's going to take another shot at it. We'd also talk about what I

00:02:57.280 think is the most crazy of all of his fitness challenges that he does for himself, but I won't

00:03:02.280 spoil that here. I wanted to talk with Ryan basically because he's one of the few people who has achieved

00:03:07.760 remarkable success across two seemingly opposite disciplines, which is, you know, extreme distance

00:03:14.940 running, extreme aerobic fitness, and then obviously extreme strength training. And we talk a lot about

00:03:21.720 the toll that the former took on his body. In fact, I knew before this interview that Ryan had suffered

00:03:27.740 from really low testosterone during his running days. I didn't realize how low it was. He actually

00:03:33.480 revealed during this interview that it was in the 100s, meaning it was below 200 nanograms per

00:03:37.860 deciliter. That would be below or in the first percentile. That is so incredibly low. It's amazing

00:03:44.740 to me that he could function, period. Today, he says his testosterone is about a thousand nanograms

00:03:50.300 per deciliter, which places him at about the 90th percentile. Obviously a testament to how he's changed

00:03:55.620 his nutrition and the fact that he's not running 110 miles a week. In this episode, we talk about

00:04:00.340 his career, but not necessarily in the most linear way, his amazing successes and his epic failures

00:04:06.160 and what he's learned through these experiences. And I think this is just kind of an amazing

00:04:11.060 interview, even if you're not a runner, but I think it really talks a lot about the mindset of

00:04:16.440 what it means to be successful. And you'll get the sense when you listen to this, that Ryan is just an

00:04:20.740 incredibly optimistic person. He's the kind of person who really never seems to let failure get to him

00:04:27.200 in a way that maybe some of us, certainly myself would. And I think his optimism is kind of what's

00:04:32.200 allowed him to bounce back from so many setbacks. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my

00:04:36.440 conversation with Ryan Hall. Hey Ryan, looking very forward to having this discussion with you today.

00:04:46.780 I've been a fan of yours for a long time, actually. And running is kind of like, I don't know,

00:04:51.340 it's sort of like F1. It's not really that popular in the United States, although it's becoming more so.

00:04:56.420 I mean, obviously Netflix's Drive to Survive series has made F1 very popular. And I think also people

00:05:01.400 are starting to become a little bit more aware of runners after, well, I don't really know what it

00:05:05.880 is, but I think Kipchoge's two-hour sub effort kind of got a lot of people in this country excited

00:05:11.560 about it. But I think for me, the interest in running started because I used to swim with Alan Webb.

00:05:17.520 So back in the early 2000s, when he was this phenom who sets the high school record for the mile,

00:05:25.220 and I'm swimming next to this guy in the next lane and just became kind of interested in his

00:05:30.740 journey. And then obviously learned about you and the other runners of that generation. So anyway,

00:05:36.360 your transformation has been remarkable and I almost don't know where to begin, but

00:05:39.300 let's just start with, because some people won't know a lot about you, but

00:05:42.540 so you grew up in Big Bear, right?

00:05:45.240 Yeah, correct. Southern California.

00:05:47.380 Yeah, but it's at altitude. So it's not like beach Southern California. When people think SoCal,

00:05:51.960 they think Orange County or San Diego, right?

00:05:55.180 Yeah. I mean, Big Bear is a really cool place to grow up. I mean, we're like two hours from the

00:05:59.580 beach. So it's one of the few places you can like both surf and snowboard or ski in the same day.

00:06:05.540 Yeah, we grew up with snow. I live like a mile away from Snow Summit. And it was just honestly,

00:06:10.700 it's like the perfect place to grow up as a distance runner. Like when you look at the best guys in the

00:06:14.760 world, they're oftentimes coming from Ethiopia and Kenya, places that are at 7,000 feet altitude.

00:06:20.740 And that's exactly what I was at. And so kind of just found myself in like the perfect scenario for

00:06:26.720 a distance runner. And even in the sense of being able to live high and train low. So when I was

00:06:32.340 growing up in high school, my dad was my coach, started a cross country and track team just so I

00:06:36.900 could run. There wasn't even one available at Big Bear High School. We would drop down like twice a

00:06:41.540 week, drive an hour down to sea level, get on a track at sea level, run some super hard interval

00:06:46.460 sessions, and then pop back up to altitude. So we're kind of before our time in a lot of ways,

00:06:52.040 you know, like the research and studies are showing how beneficial that kind of training is. But we were

00:06:57.260 just doing it because it just made sense. It was the environment in which I found myself and pretty

00:07:03.220 crazy to look back on it now and see how things like that really do kind of contribute to the

00:07:07.760 trajectory of the path that you're on.

00:07:09.860 And I suspect there's something to being in that environment when you're young during the

00:07:14.380 formative years of your cardiovascular system. I look at like my daughter who's 13, and she loves

00:07:21.760 volleyball and basketball, but doesn't like cross country or track. And I'm trying not to be a psycho

00:07:27.140 about it. But I'm also sort of telling her like, you have this really narrow window in which your

00:07:31.420 cardiovascular system is quite malleable. And I'm very fortunate that because I was involved in boxing,

00:07:37.680 I had to do so much cardio, both aerobic and anaerobic training during those formative years.

00:07:42.820 And even though I'm a fraction of that level of fitness today, I can still ride on what I had

00:07:49.180 then. But I feel like if you don't push that system hard in your teenage years, it's very hard

00:07:55.000 to develop it later. I don't know if that's true, but that has been my impression. And then to take

00:07:58.960 that one step further, which is what someone like you has been able to do, to have that altitude

00:08:03.600 arbitrage is, I think, just unbelievable.

00:08:06.820 Oh, yeah. I mean, the effects of cardio at a young age definitely play on later in life. Like

00:08:13.100 now, for example, like, I really don't do much cardio at all. Like last year, I had nine months

00:08:19.780 where just focus on strength training, just trying to get as big and strong as I can. My weight went

00:08:24.400 up from 167 to 192 over nine months. And I was literally doing zero running, none, like no other

00:08:32.100 cardio, no biking, no swimming, nothing. I hopped on a treadmill at the end of that period when I was

00:08:36.920 at my heaviest, just to see, like, let me see where my miles at. Cause I was going to train for

00:08:40.800 this challenge that I tried this 500 pound deadlift into a sub five minute mile. So I was like, let me

00:08:45.140 see where I'm at. Just starting wise, hopped on a treadmill after my weight session, 518 for the mile

00:08:50.460 with zero, zero training. And I think that goes to kind of like what you're talking about. Like when

00:08:55.240 you develop that early on and like, you just need little touches here and there. I take pretty short

00:08:59.840 rest between a lot of my lifts and that's like enough to keep me in 518 mile shape without even

00:09:04.720 trying, you know, but yeah, I mean, there's a ton of interesting things. Like they talk about

00:09:09.040 kids who were born at altitude and how they have greater potential for cardio development over time.

00:09:15.880 But it's kind of interesting, like looking at my family, I'm in the middle of five kids,

00:09:19.220 my youngest brother, Chad, he's super into endurance stuff. And he was born at altitude where I was born

00:09:25.400 in Seattle, Washington. How old were you when you got to big bear?

00:09:28.380 I was five years old. So pretty young. So I've spent most of my time at altitude,

00:09:33.120 but he was born at altitude, but we didn't really see a whole drastic effect. I mean,

00:09:37.520 he was a really good runner. He won the national championships in high school cross country.

00:09:41.380 So a stud runner went, went to Oregon on scholarship and all that stuff. But

00:09:45.220 between him and I, there's not like a huge difference in what we've seen in terms of

00:09:49.760 our top end potential for cardio. The other thing that you alluded to that I wanted to talk about

00:09:54.880 later, but we might as well just talk about it now because you brought it up. And I think it's an

00:09:57.640 important thing that I became pretty interested in many years later when I was swimming and trying

00:10:03.540 to look for ways to improve was basically the matrix of living high, living low, training high,

00:10:11.480 training low, and coming up with what was the optimal scenario. And it turned out, as you pointed

00:10:17.200 out, this is something for which we have a very clear answer today. The answer wasn't clear 20 years

00:10:22.360 ago. Today, the answer is crystal clear, which is the best results are attained from living high,

00:10:28.480 training low when it comes to intensity. So you can live high, train high for low end aerobic

00:10:34.660 efficiency, but you have to train that anaerobic peak at sea level. And so I remember swimming up in

00:10:42.260 Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center when I would go up there for some swim camps and stuff.

00:10:46.060 And being a guy who lived at sea level who would then go to try to push it hard in Colorado,

00:10:51.220 I mean, it was a total waste of time. I mean, it was a complete waste of time to try to do any top

00:10:57.300 end anaerobic stuff when I hadn't had any ability to do that. In fact, it was the exact opposite you'd

00:11:02.080 want to do. And so I had friends who lived at sea level, but they would have oxygen deprivation

00:11:08.120 tents that they would sleep in at sea level to functionally replicate the living high so then they

00:11:13.740 could train at sea level. What you described growing up is really the kind of perfect way to

00:11:18.680 be able to do that. You made it sound like that was just sort of accidentally discovered though.

00:11:22.640 You guys just sort of empirically stumbled upon the efficacy of that training.

00:11:26.960 Yeah. It was just kind of like, it just felt good. You know, anytime I'd hop down to sea level to do

00:11:31.440 track workout, it's kind of like you're saying, Peter, it's like, I try that stuff at altitude and

00:11:35.800 like running 400 meter repeats on short rests or like longer aerobic efforts where you're trying to do

00:11:41.320 like mile reps at super fast. You just, you've got to do it. You have to structure it different at

00:11:45.940 altitude. Whereas you go down to sea level and you can spend a lot of time at race pace, you know,

00:11:51.180 working on that turnover, which you just can't do at altitude without breaking it up more. And so

00:11:55.940 that's what we do a lot of when we're up high, staying up high for intervals is we'll just break

00:11:59.640 things up where you're doing a bunch of two hundreds on really short rest. But yeah, we just enjoyed

00:12:04.680 popping down to sea level for those sessions just felt good. And it was working. The results were very

00:12:10.440 obvious, but yeah, the whole altitude thing is really interesting because my wife, Sarah,

00:12:14.900 who's a professional marathon runner, she's run two 20 for the marathon, which is the second fastest

00:12:19.280 ever by an American. It took her, she grew up at sea level in Santa Rosa, California. So when you're

00:12:24.980 talking Peter about going up to Colorado and doing the swimming and stuff, there's also this effect of

00:12:29.980 like how many years have you spent in altitude? So like, for example, I am super good at altitude in

00:12:35.480 terms of running, you know, like I can run pretty close to my sea level times at 7,000 feet altitude.

00:12:41.620 At what distance? At any distance?

00:12:44.260 So particular, I'm thinking about like marathon training. So like what's most important marathon

00:12:49.020 training is your thresholds. So 15 mile thresholds, we just run 15 miles at that kind of marathon

00:12:54.620 intensity. And I could run 12, 15 miles at 448 per mile, which is about marathon pace at 7,000 feet.

00:13:02.720 And if I pop down to sea level, maybe I'm running like 442 pace, 440 pace, but I didn't get a huge

00:13:08.420 conversion from altitude to sea level. Whereas someone like my wife, Sarah, who wasn't as accustomed

00:13:13.640 to altitude, she'll get sometimes like 20 seconds a mile where she's running that much slower at

00:13:18.360 altitude, that much faster at sea level. But she's also gotten better the more times she's

00:13:23.320 spinning altitude. So she first, we moved to Mammoth Lakes out of college after we graduated from

00:13:28.780 Stanford in 2005. And she was hating living in Mammoth at 8,000 feet for such a long time.

00:13:36.060 But gradually over time, like she's gotten much, much better at altitude, probably still not as

00:13:40.700 good as like I was when I was in my prime. But now we have to even go up to higher altitudes to get

00:13:46.200 similar effects to what we were getting before. So we have a place in Crested Butte, Colorado,

00:13:50.360 where we're sleeping at 9,400 feet. And every time she goes up there, we see a massive jump

00:13:56.320 in her fitness, just from doing like a month stand up there. So you have to keep playing with it.

00:14:01.880 So you realize the science is there and your experiences are true, but also your body's

00:14:06.640 dynamic. It's always changing, right? So you got to like, you just can't repeat the same thing over

00:14:12.380 and over and over again. Like you have to realize my whole body is always changing, always adapting.

00:14:17.740 So I got to be throwing new things at it. And that's like a big thing that I've learned in the

00:14:21.980 lifting space as well. It's like if I'm just doing the same lifting all the time and not trying new

00:14:26.940 mechanisms to add weight to the bar, different tactics, like I'm just not going to see growth,

00:14:31.760 right? So it's just, that's the fun thing about running, training, lifting. It's all just an

00:14:36.740 experiment of one. It's just all just a giant experiment, right? And you're just always like

00:14:41.280 tweaking little variables. And that's what I love about fitness, running, all of that stuff is I love

00:14:47.000 seeing growth. I love just like the frustration of not seeing growth, getting plateaus and be like,

00:14:52.460 what is going on right now? And like, my mind's just like chewing on this over and over again for

00:14:57.220 like months and months. And then I'm just making little tweaks, little tweaks till I find it.

00:15:01.480 Then you find it and bang, it clicks, you know, and whether it's in the weight room or running,

00:15:05.940 all of a sudden you're doing what you couldn't do before. And you're like, ah, I just love,

00:15:10.100 I love learning and growing in that way, you know?

00:15:12.840 Well, you really touched on a lot of things there, but one of them is this concept of

00:15:16.940 progressive overload. And I think that that is one of the hardest things to really do when you're

00:15:23.500 training yourself as most of us are, right? Most of us, we're just kind of weekend warriors and we're,

00:15:28.500 we're sort of our own coaches and it is very easy to get kind of comfortable. And again, it's true in

00:15:35.760 the weight room. It's true on the bike. It's true if you're running or whatever it is you're doing,

00:15:39.220 but therein lies the challenge of being able to progressively overload, which doesn't always

00:15:44.240 mean weight. It can mean sets. It can mean reps. It can mean reduction in rest time.

00:15:48.560 There's so many ways that one can progressively overload lately. I've become pretty obsessed with

00:15:52.600 blood flow restriction and weight training. So that becomes another way to progressively

00:15:56.300 overload using a fraction of the weight that you would normally use.

00:15:59.840 Yeah. I've been doing some of that too. I love that, especially for runners because

00:16:04.600 runners, like I got hurt. I was training for the Beijing Olympics. I was at the Olympic

00:16:08.980 training center in Chula Vista working with a strength coach. He had me on one of those

00:16:12.520 vibrating platforms to warm up for squatting. And it worked great. Like I was able to like warm

00:16:17.380 up and get into a much deeper squat than never got into before. But like as a runner, most runners

00:16:23.100 are super tight and the ankle mobility isn't there. Like shouldn't be down in a butt to the ground

00:16:28.860 squat. It's just not beneficial for distance runners. It's not specific for distance runners.

00:16:33.160 So anyways, long story short, I ended up tweaking like the connection to my patella and, uh, that

00:16:39.440 bothered me all the way up to Beijing in Beijing. Uh, I was kicking myself so much for getting hurt

00:16:45.100 lifting, you know? Now you had a pretty good run in Beijing though. I mean, you finished 10th if I

00:16:49.960 recall. Yeah. Yeah. I was 10th there, but to me, like it wasn't about what place I finished.

00:16:55.520 It was the sensation of clicking. Yeah. You didn't click. You went out a little slow in that race. If I

00:17:02.060 recall you, you were very tentative, like the first 15 K and then you actually kind of came back. You

00:17:08.940 basically, I don't know if you negative split by time, but it seemed by effort you certainly did.

00:17:14.660 Yeah. I mean, I've wrote a book about like that whole experience, you know, like so much went into

00:17:19.560 that, but I also wasn't clicking in training. You know how you can tell when like in training,

00:17:24.120 it's like, Oh, I just feel like before I ran the Houston half, I went for a run in big bear a couple

00:17:28.960 days before that race. And it was snowing like crazy. Like those big old snowflakes are come down

00:17:34.440 super slow and it was just stacking up. I was literally running in like a foot of snow on the

00:17:38.960 roads. They hadn't even been plowed yet. And I felt like Tigger, like, I just felt like I was just

00:17:43.800 bouncing along as effortless. Like when things are clicking in training, then it's like, Ooh,

00:17:49.920 this is going to be fun. You know, you're kind of licking your chops kind of feel going into Beijing.

00:17:54.140 I didn't take a big break after running two Oh six at the London marathon in April. I didn't take

00:18:00.380 my customary two week break where I put on 10 pounds and don't run at all. I didn't do that.

00:18:05.940 And so then I was just kind of flat, like the whole buildup for Beijing. So I wasn't, I wasn't

00:18:10.100 right going into the race, but then there's also this thing of, you're talking to the scientists and

00:18:15.320 we're doing like all this stuff at the Olympic training center where they're prepping us for the

00:18:18.900 race, talking about how hot and humid it's going to be. And it was one of those big life learning

00:18:23.740 experiences for me where the storyline is it's going to be so hot and humid. It's going to be

00:18:28.340 slow. It's going to be one in like two, 12 to 11. Right. And so we're just buying this story and

00:18:33.860 we're hearing the story over and over again. And I didn't do what I learned to do after that,

00:18:39.400 which is like, you got to be like the samurai. It's like, you got to be ready for any situation

00:18:43.540 that's going to come, you know, and not expect anything. So like the same is like, expect nothing,

00:18:48.360 be ready for anything. And I wasn't in that state of mind. I was like, all right,

00:18:52.000 it's going to be chill. The first mile or something. And right from the gun, Sammy's just

00:18:56.500 like gone. The guy who ended up winning the gold medal just took it out super hard. Right. And it

00:19:01.140 was like, mentally, I got hit in the chin with an uppercut, like right out of the gate, you know,

00:19:06.600 because I wasn't, I wasn't ready for that scenario at all. So then you get back and you're in like 60th

00:19:11.800 place and you're trying to win a medal. And you're like, you don't win a medal from 60th place. I mean,

00:19:16.540 you can, but you have to really like coach yourself through some tough spots because

00:19:21.200 you don't have momentum on your side. And a lot of competing well in anything is getting excited

00:19:27.020 while you're out there. Right. Like you got to be just building this snowball of excitement as the

00:19:32.680 race is playing out. And I was having the opposite experience of that, where I was like, I'm not where

00:19:37.220 I want to be. I'm too far back. Can't even see the leaders. The helicopter is like way off in the

00:19:42.000 distance, you know? And so I had to kind of coach myself through that. And actually how I did that

00:19:47.080 was by encouraging other guys around me, which isn't a normal tactic that you do. But as I

00:19:53.060 encouraged other people, it encouraged me that like, I was like, you'll able to hold a conversation

00:19:58.040 with people. And I just felt better from just like trying to actually help other people out.

00:20:02.640 And it shifted what was happening inside my mind, inside my heart. And I was able to kind of find my

00:20:07.880 own rhythm and start to work my way up in that race and finish 10th, which I wasn't stoked on at

00:20:12.980 the time. Like I was trying to get a medal, but it's funny, the further removed you get from these

00:20:17.440 things and the older you get, you, you appreciate it more, you know? And so I look back on it now,

00:20:22.440 proud of the performance. Was Meb also, I mean, Meb got a silver, if I recall in Athens in 04, right?

00:20:28.980 Yeah. And then he-

00:20:30.220 Was he there in 08?

00:20:31.880 He wasn't. No. So we were training together up in Mammoth Lakes and he was dealing with a lot of

00:20:36.720 injury issues going into it. So he, I think he DNF'd at the trials that year in 2007. He had some

00:20:43.520 gnarly kind of hip stuff going on. And that was actually really cool to see Meb in that situation

00:20:50.180 where he went through so many injuries, so many downtimes, and like, even like mentally struggling

00:20:56.080 with how to handle that and see him pop out the other end of that when New York, when Boston

00:21:00.760 was just incredible. So he's, we were neighbors in Mammoth when we were training. We live like 400

00:21:06.260 meters apart and he's always been kind of like a big brother to me. So such a good dude. And yeah,

00:21:11.060 I was, you know, in that race when he won Boston and that was such a special experience. I remember

00:21:16.200 I was, I was having a bad day that day.

00:21:17.820 It was a horrible day for you though. Yeah.

00:21:19.480 Yeah. Yeah. I was running terrible. Yeah. But I just remember coming up over Heartbreak Hill

00:21:24.000 and, you know, we don't know what's happening out there. I knew Meb was away and I knew that like

00:21:28.420 our group was pretty far back and I knew he had a chance of winning it, but you don't know

00:21:32.560 what's happening. So I, I was coming up over Heartbreak Hill and I remember just yelling at

00:21:36.340 the spectators on the side. I was like, how is Meb doing when he came past here? And they're like,

00:21:40.460 he was winning when he came past. And I knew if he got over Heartbreak Hill in the lead,

00:21:43.820 he was going to win that thing. So yeah, that was special.

00:21:47.760 It is hard to believe that that was 2014 because that's just one of those races that is seared in my

00:21:53.680 mind. I remember it so well because I used to, I don't want to say I trained with Meb,

00:21:59.680 but we trained at the same place in San Diego. So there's this place called Fiesta Island.

00:22:04.080 It's perfectly flat. So that's where all the time trial races are. So three or four days a week,

00:22:09.040 I would do my training on Fiesta Island. It's seven kilometers and it's perfectly flat. And,

00:22:14.200 and Meb would do his tempo runs there. And early on a Tuesday or Thursday morning,

00:22:18.400 we'd be the only two guys out there, me on my bike, him running. And, you know, I think it's

00:22:23.200 actually worth pointing out to people listening to this who aren't familiar with some of these times,

00:22:27.200 just how fast you guys run. So you threw around some numbers earlier, like, you know, marathon

00:22:33.380 pace, 442 to 448. I mean, these are such insanely fast speeds that I think the likelihood that a

00:22:42.560 person could run that speed for half a mile is virtually zero, right? Like I know right now I

00:22:49.360 could not go out and run 800 meters, half a mile at that pace. There's simply no way.

00:22:54.900 Yeah. Which is funny because I can't either.

00:22:57.120 I know, but it's just, it's so fast. And I used to have a sign in my office that said 442. So it

00:23:04.340 was a pace clock and it said 442. And it's actually came from, I remember getting this idea off

00:23:10.820 something one of your sponsors did for one of your races many, many years ago, they had

00:23:15.240 a treadmill set up to that pace. And the idea was they just had random people show up and they're

00:23:20.480 like, how long can you hold the pace that he holds for a little over two hours. And so they put a

00:23:26.960 harness around a person's waist and they'd make them run at 442. And these people were getting shot

00:23:32.360 off the back of this treadmill after 30 seconds, 40 seconds, one person made it a minute, right?

00:23:38.340 And the reason I had that sign up in my office was I was very circumspect slash put off by the notion

00:23:46.940 that people would say, Hey man, we're training for a marathon, not a sprint. This is a marathon,

00:23:52.600 not a sprint. And I tried to make the point to people that, okay, but if you want to win a marathon,

00:23:58.600 it feels like sprinting. So let's be clear. It's one thing to go out and run a marathon and take six

00:24:04.380 hours to do it. It's another thing to go out and win a marathon. So if you're trying to win a

00:24:07.660 marathon, you have to understand the pain that these guys are in. You have to understand what

00:24:12.180 442 means. It is insanity. And yes, for you, it is below your threshold, but your threshold is so

00:24:20.000 high. So looking at Meb win that race and having seen him in the months leading up to that, and I'm

00:24:29.680 on my bike and I'm seeing how fast he's running, doing his tempo repeats and stuff. It's just,

00:24:36.420 it is really amazing. And I do think it's one of those things where I wish everybody

00:24:41.780 could try to run at that pace and do the exercise that was done on that treadmill or something like

00:24:47.680 that. Because otherwise I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today is very hard to

00:24:51.400 understand from a physiological standpoint. Yeah. I mean, if like people just go out to the track

00:24:56.020 and just try and run 200 meters at a, yeah, like my, my half marathon pace is 433 per mile,

00:25:02.900 right? So that's 34 seconds per 200. So if you just go out to the track and try and run a 34,

00:25:09.140 it's pretty crazy because guys, when they're racing, they make it look so effortless, like

00:25:13.680 Kipchoge when he's running sub two, like it looks so slow. So, and it's 34 seconds per 200 is what he's

00:25:19.180 running. And that is very fast, like 200. But yeah, I mean, what you're talking about,

00:25:24.420 Peter is super important. Like distance runners are not slow, world-class marathoners. I want the

00:25:30.160 guy now I'm coaching, you know, I want the guy who can run 49 seconds for a 400. That's the kind

00:25:35.500 of speed you have to have. Now you don't have to have that speed while you're doing marathon training,

00:25:40.840 but you need to have had that speed before that, like as a kid growing up. That's why I like with

00:25:46.760 kids, I'm like, get as fast as you can. Cause if you want to be a world-class marathoner,

00:25:50.660 I need 49 seconds speed, right? Like that's the kind of speed that Kipchoge has. And then that

00:25:55.560 carries you on to be able to run a great mile, to be able to run a great 5k. Like it's all built

00:26:00.640 off speed. Like that's what we work on with training. It's like, let me develop your 5k

00:26:04.680 speed, your mile speed first, which is directly correlated to your sprint speed. Let me develop

00:26:09.480 all that. And then we'll grow that into 10k speed. Then we'll grow that into half marathon speed

00:26:14.000 and we'll grow that into marathon speed. But marathoners are, they have wheels and we would

00:26:19.520 have to train in training. I'm doing 50 meter sprints twice a week in the middle of marathon

00:26:24.260 training, 50 meter sprints, like little hill sprints. We're in the weight room. It's a power

00:26:29.020 to weight ratio. Like, so you got to have power. And that's, that's an area I've grown a ton in since

00:26:34.280 I've retired from running. And as I look back at my, the weights I was doing, I just kind of like

00:26:38.920 scratch my head. I'm like, Oh, I wish I could go back and do things a little bit differently in the

00:26:42.420 weight room. Cause I don't think I was using my time effectively there, but yeah, it's power is

00:26:47.520 so important for distance runners of all. I mean, less, maybe if you're doing like super ultra stuff,

00:26:52.720 maybe it's not quite as important, but for marathoners, you got to have that speed.

00:26:56.360 I think it matters everywhere. And I think, I know that Meb was doing deadlifts as he was preparing

00:27:02.300 for 2014. I talked to a guy who had overseen part of his strength training program. And one of the

00:27:08.840 things he was really fixated on was his strength to weight ratio is measured by a deadlift.

00:27:15.180 Yep. Hex bar deadlift, right?

00:27:17.000 That's right. Hex bar deadlift with a high concentric and a drop eccentric. So you pick

00:27:22.660 it up, drop it, pick it up, drop it. Right? So the reason for that being the eccentric

00:27:26.080 tears, the muscle fibers was you're tearing muscle fibers. That's what's creating hypertrophy. We

00:27:30.360 didn't want any hypertrophy. We just wanted the strength. So it was pick it up, drop it, pick it up,

00:27:35.000 drop it. When Meb first started, if I recall his strength to body weight ratio for a single rep max

00:27:43.080 was 1.3. So pretty pathetic, right? If we can be honest, right? He could only deadlift 1.3 times

00:27:49.500 his body weight. I believe going into Boston, he was able to get to three to one, maybe it was 2.7,

00:27:55.720 but it was in that vicinity. And the logic for this was really just physics. When you run,

00:28:04.620 you have to hit the ground with a toe, let's assume you're toe striking, not heel striking,

00:28:09.220 but your foot has to hit the ground. The harder you hit the ground, the harder the ground hits

00:28:13.960 you. The harder the ground hits you, the higher you go. The higher you go, the further your stride.

00:28:19.740 And so they basically had calculated that for Meb to run the pace he wanted to run in Boston that year,

00:28:26.140 he needed to add four inches to his stride. And to do that basically required taking his

00:28:33.580 maximal force per unit body weight from something like 1.3 to 2.7. That was going to translate to

00:28:41.180 four more inches of stride. So he didn't increase his stride rate, he just increased stride length,

00:28:46.280 and that was done through strength. And I suspect that that's becoming more understood in running now,

00:28:51.380 because there was a day when I suspect runners were told, don't lift weights, right? You want

00:28:56.840 to be as skinny as possible. It's not about that type of strength. And I'm guessing that that's not

00:29:02.000 at all how you coach your runners. No, yeah. We're super into strength training. And kind of like

00:29:07.200 you're saying, my understanding even has changed so much throughout the years where I used to always

00:29:12.800 think about your foot action, hitting the ground. I always thought it was being like a tiger paw,

00:29:17.240 and you're like pulling the ground when really that's not what you're going for. You're going

00:29:21.480 for like you're saying, you're stomping the ground. You're putting force into the ground. That's going

00:29:25.540 to shoot you up and out, right? And I never thought about that way. I was always just trying to like

00:29:30.140 paw the ground. And so that's where you want to use your glutes too, right? Your glutes are your

00:29:34.280 strongest, biggest muscle. And yet like so many runners, myself included as a pro runner, I had very

00:29:39.840 underdeveloped glutes. I would have been way faster, way better if my glute strength was better.

00:29:44.860 Yeah. And your hamstrings were probably quite weak and probably incredibly tight.

00:29:49.500 Right. Yeah.

00:29:50.720 Those insights came from sprinters, right? So I believe Usain Bolt has the greatest force per

00:29:57.300 unit mass ever measured on a force plate treadmill. So you've probably seen these treadmills where

00:30:02.500 you run on the treadmill and it tells you how much force you're putting into the ground.

00:30:07.780 And I believe Usain Bolt is able to put six times his body weight into the ground with each strike,

00:30:14.460 with each foot strike. I mean, it's just, it's crazy to think how strong that is.

00:30:20.220 Yeah. Yeah. It's unreal. But yeah, I think for people who are listening, if you're a runner,

00:30:24.100 like try that next time you go out, try like pushing through the ground rather than trying

00:30:28.480 to paw the ground, how you contact the ground. So important. So a lot of people are rolling through

00:30:33.160 the ground. It's very difficult to utilize those glutes and to really put force into the ground when

00:30:37.580 you're rolling from your heel to your toe, right? So you've got to like contact the ground,

00:30:41.900 like mid foot and just be like stomping the ground. And, but yeah, the weight training helps

00:30:46.880 tremendously with that. So, so, so important for sprinters for, yeah. And the hex bar deadlift,

00:30:52.280 that's my favorite lift. I was advising runners or when I am coaching runners, that's the first lift

00:30:57.380 that they do on the day. It's the most important one. And the one that we're always trying to increase

00:31:01.480 the amount of load they're able to handle with that. Have you used this device called a G flight?

00:31:06.300 So it's these two little red boxes that shine a laser beam between them and they measure how high

00:31:13.580 you can jump and your ground contact time. Hmm. No, no, that sounds interesting though.

00:31:18.280 So it's super interesting. So it's become a part of my training now. So the way it works is it's

00:31:23.560 shining a little laser across the floor. So you lay these things down on the floor and if you stand

00:31:28.700 between them static and you jump and come down, it will tell you with incredible precision,

00:31:33.320 how high you've jumped because it measures how long you're off the ground. And it's a simple

00:31:38.860 physics formula to figure out how high you went. So that's really interesting. So one, you can use

00:31:43.720 it for static vertical jump, but I think where you would find it more interesting for your runners

00:31:48.840 is when you do depth jumps. So now you put it in front of a box and you have the athlete jump off the

00:31:55.840 box, hit the ground and jump up. Now it gives you two pieces of information. It tells you how long

00:32:02.380 you were in contact with the ground and how high you went and the marker of a great runner or a person

00:32:09.580 who is very good at generating force is you should have a higher vertical jump when you jump off a box

00:32:17.200 and land and go up than just static. Most people don't. Most people will jump higher static off the

00:32:24.340 ground than off the box. And the reason is their ground contact time is way too long and they dissipate

00:32:30.240 way too much force. I forget the metrics that I believe you want to be beneath 0.28 seconds of

00:32:37.480 ground contact time. I think that's the number I struggle with this. So I'm still jumping higher

00:32:42.700 from a static than off a box. And my ground contact time is always north of 0.3 seconds. So this is one

00:32:49.380 of the things I've been working on, not because I'm remotely interested in running fast, but because I'm

00:32:53.780 interested in my feet becoming very good at load dissipation and load transfer and force transfer.

00:33:00.620 So I think that's just a very important skill as you age, whether you're walking down a flight of

00:33:04.620 stairs, whether you're hiking. But for a runner, I would suspect if you could get people down into a

00:33:10.020 ground contact time of like 0.2 to 0.25, that's going to translate to exactly what you're saying.

00:33:15.020 Because the way you describe it, like the sort of rolling foot on the ground, like you're never going

00:33:19.880 to get forced that way. You're just spending, you could be spending, you know, 0.6 seconds on the

00:33:24.980 ground when you're rolling your foot across it. Instead, you want to be like hitting it super

00:33:29.540 quickly and getting up. Yeah. You know what blows my mind about that though, as we're talking about

00:33:34.220 this, I'm just thinking, I'm sure you're familiar with Jim Ryan, right? Yeah. So I'm just thinking

00:33:39.240 about him and somehow he was a heel striker. And like, I know of like, I think Dathan Ritzenheim's a

00:33:45.140 heel striker. Obdi, I just saw him the other day up in Flagstaff. He's also a heel striker.

00:33:50.340 And like, how are these guys running so fast from heel striking? Like, is it a thing where like,

00:33:55.520 they could be much faster if they weren't heel striking? Or like, is there some kind of

00:34:01.200 advantageousness to that that we're not aware of or seen? I don't know. I'm super curious about that.

00:34:07.400 I would put it in what you said earlier. It might be that a combination of A, there are just some

00:34:12.040 people who really adapt to a certain way of doing things. And it might be that they run really well

00:34:17.660 despite that. But everything I've read on this subject matter and all of the experts I've spoken

00:34:23.140 to suggest that forefoot to toe striking is the way we were meant to run. If you go back and look

00:34:31.000 at how our ancestors ran and you look at really how force transfer would be most efficient, you don't

00:34:36.240 want to be striking on the heel. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. But yeah, it's interesting

00:34:42.160 to see people getting away with it. But I'm with you. I'm always interested in like, not what can

00:34:47.260 you get away with, but what is optimal, right? Because I think it's easy to do that when you

00:34:50.900 look at like how the Africans train. Like we've spent a lot of time training in Kenya and Ethiopia

00:34:55.140 and like they don't even go cool down. And these are the best runners in the world on the planet

00:35:00.260 and they don't go cool down. And I'm like, we learned to cool down in like middle school

00:35:04.020 cross country and the importance of that, you know? And you find yourself being like,

00:35:07.840 well, maybe they got it right. Maybe we shouldn't be cooling down. But I always remind myself like,

00:35:12.020 well, what is optimal? That's really what I'm after. Not what can you get away with?

00:35:16.600 Yeah. I've gotten so off track. I wanted to kind of go through a bunch of other things,

00:35:20.160 but like, I just want to now geek out on all this other stuff. But I think just for folks to have a

00:35:24.240 bit of a sense of your trajectory, because we've touched on so many things. I mean, we very

00:35:28.020 quickly just in passing throughout there, the Houston marathon, where you became the first American to break an

00:35:33.700 hour and you still hold the American record for that, a record that may stand for some time.

00:35:37.820 But let's go back. You're growing up in Big Bear, your dad, an amazing baseball player,

00:35:42.740 and you were typical baseball, basketball, et cetera. It didn't pick up running, if I recall,

00:35:47.440 till you were like 13 or something. Yeah, correct. Yeah. You did your homework, Peter.

00:35:50.900 Yeah, man. And you did like your first run. You just decided, dad, I want to run around the lake.

00:35:55.960 That's a 15 mile run. How much did that hurt?

00:35:58.460 Oh, it was the pain train the whole time. There was no like magic to that run, right? It was like

00:36:05.520 just suffering the whole time. I was in basketball shoes. I had no idea what I was doing. My legs just

00:36:10.480 felt like they just got pounded into a million little pieces like halfway through it. So, I mean,

00:36:14.840 we had to stop multiple times. We stopped at a liquor store and got like a Sobeez, like a drink or

00:36:21.680 whatever, and stopped and iced my legs. And really, like if my dad wasn't there, I probably wouldn't have

00:36:26.340 made it around the lake. But that was such a learning experience for me now as a dad of for myself

00:36:31.400 being like, how do we respond to our kids and their crazy ideas? You know, like this was just

00:36:36.400 some like crazy thing that I decided to do when I was 13. And yet, look what it did. Like it totally

00:36:42.340 changed the trajectory of my entire life. Completely different now. And just some crazy idea. It'd been

00:36:48.740 very easy for my dad to be like, you know what, let's just start with like a two mile run instead of

00:36:53.000 starting with a 15 mile run, you know? But that wouldn't have captured me in the same way. Like

00:36:57.540 I needed a hook that was just going to be like, I'm forever changed. Like the trajectory of my life

00:37:03.260 is never going to be the same. Like I needed something big like that. And I'm so glad that

00:37:08.220 he didn't try and gun down my ideas. Just like, all right, if that's what you want to do, let's go do

00:37:12.260 it. I can't imagine that pain actually, because I had a very similar experience at a far smaller

00:37:17.900 distance when I was maybe 12. And I just woke up one day and I was like, I want to go run five

00:37:24.080 miles. I want to see how fast I can run five miles. And so I put on my crappy shoes and I went out and

00:37:31.480 I ran five miles and it hurt so much. It hurt so much. And the next day I was like, I'm going to do

00:37:39.320 it again. And I went out and I did it again and it hurt so much. And I went out and I did it the third

00:37:45.440 day and it hurt so much. And then something on the fourth day changed. And on the fourth day,

00:37:49.920 I felt awesome. And then I just never stopped. Just sort of adding more distance from there.

00:37:55.500 But when you think about how non-linear running is, like if I was feeling that pain at five miles,

00:38:02.260 five miles is a quarter of 13 in terms of effort. So what was going through your mind at the five mile

00:38:11.360 mark at the eight mile mark? Were you thinking, I love this pain. I love proving to myself that I

00:38:17.680 can do this. Or was the part of you thinking, why am I doing this? I mean, there were so many

00:38:21.660 thoughts. That's the thing about distance running. It's really like what's going on in your head is

00:38:25.560 hugely important. Right. And so like now, like when I'm training athletes on the mental aspect of it,

00:38:30.840 I tell them like, you got to have a whole bunch of different like arrows essentially that you can pull

00:38:35.280 out and use. Cause it's like, sometimes you use one thing, it doesn't work. You got to go to

00:38:39.100 something else and it doesn't work. So I have all these different tactics and managing pain and

00:38:43.560 discomfort. But like, honestly, like one of the biggest ones that is most helpful for me is simply

00:38:49.720 turning the mind off. You just turn the mind off and you just like, keep putting one foot in front

00:38:54.620 of the other. It sounds so simple and so basic, but like, I can tell you like the last 5k of the

00:39:00.600 Boston marathon, when I'm in a world of pain and just trying to get to the finish line as fast as I

00:39:04.700 can, there's no like profound thoughts going in through here. It's just like put one foot in front

00:39:10.000 of the other as fast as you can. Like it's that simple. So in those moments, like oftentimes I'm

00:39:15.520 just like, turn the brain off and just keep moving, just keep moving. And a lot of it's just like

00:39:19.700 to like refusing to believe that you can't take one more step. Like you get yourself, at least I get

00:39:25.300 myself in trouble when I start thinking too far down the road. I'm like, oh, I still have so far to go.

00:39:30.880 There's no way I could possibly do this. Like you get overwhelmed by the scope of the challenge

00:39:37.040 sometimes, especially when you're trying to do something you've never done. And that's worse

00:39:41.240 than the actual discomfort you're feeling, right? It's that being overwhelmed thing is not a good

00:39:47.080 feeling at all. And that's, that's what makes people give up and give in. So if you can bring

00:39:51.480 yourself back to the present, to what you're doing right now, what I found is there's always enough to

00:39:56.760 get me through this moment. There's not always enough to get me through like what's coming all

00:40:01.360 down the line. If I try to just like, I'm going to handle all of it right now. It's like, no, just do

00:40:05.820 what's right in front of you. Just handle this mile that you're in right now, which is why I wrote my

00:40:10.760 book entitled run the mile you're in. Cause it's just like, you just got to bring yourself back to

00:40:14.460 being present in this moment. And there's always enough to get you through this moment.

00:40:19.020 One of the things about running that strikes me as difficult in that regard is you can't

00:40:23.560 dissociate yourself from the visual cues of how much lies ahead. I used to swim long distances

00:40:29.620 and there were a couple of really dogmatic rules that we had in ultra distance swimming.

00:40:35.020 And one of them was never look up towards shore. Like you only know you're coming to land when you

00:40:42.040 start to see the bottom of the ocean. Like when you're, you know, and that you typically don't

00:40:46.940 get that until you're like half a mile from shore. But this idea that you would ever lift your head

00:40:51.720 up to look forward is a total disaster. And I got a really bad taste of that on a swim that I was

00:40:57.040 doing. It was a training swim across Lake Tahoe. So this was not supposed to be a very difficult

00:41:02.860 swim. This was a 12 mile swim and that should have taken a little under six hours, but I, I didn't do

00:41:10.160 my homework. I didn't hire a good boat captain and he didn't understand the navigation. So to make a

00:41:16.900 very long story short, we didn't go across the lake, we zigzagged across the lake. And when we

00:41:22.960 hit this five hour mark in my head, I'm thinking I should only be two miles from shore. So I look up

00:41:30.720 at him and I say, how much further do we have? And he says about two miles. And I say, or maybe four

00:41:39.200 miles or something. I forget what the number was, but it made sense. Whatever he said made sense. And then

00:41:42.960 I stupidly looked towards the shore and had a mental image of what it looked like. I couldn't

00:41:47.440 see the trees or anything like that. You could, it couldn't make out detail. So I just put my head

00:41:52.040 down and hammered for one more hour thinking, okay, but in an hour I should see the bottom of Lake Tahoe

00:41:58.420 coming up at me. And I didn't, it looked exactly the same. And I lifted my head up and it looked

00:42:02.700 exactly the same, but meaning we were much further than he told me we were. And that is the closest I've

00:42:09.640 ever come to like quitting a swim. I was mentally destroyed. And then I said, how far are we? And

00:42:16.180 he said, I don't know, I think like four miles. And I was like, come on, like, what are you talking

00:42:21.620 about? Like, you can't mess with a swimmer. Like, I mean, I was so pissed off, but again, what did it,

00:42:27.720 why was I pissed off? I was pissed off because I had an idea in my mind that was so far ahead. I wasn't

00:42:33.220 in the, in the mile, right. I wasn't in that moment. And I think for runners, like you don't have the

00:42:39.020 luxury that a swimmer does to literally, I could swim with my eyes closed. I can really drown out

00:42:45.080 all of that other stuff. And you gave that example of being in Beijing. And it's not just that, you

00:42:51.640 know, you're in 60th. It's that you see the helicopter that's over the leaders and they're

00:42:56.960 a quarter mile up the road. That requires an extra level of mental fortitude in my mind to be able to

00:43:04.600 run your race at that point. Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, it all comes back to getting excited,

00:43:09.760 right? If you're going to perform well, you got to be excited about how you're doing. So it's like,

00:43:13.740 how can you get excited? Not just like make it through that moment, but find something to get

00:43:18.880 excited about in that moment, you know? So I talk a lot about like reframing things in your mind.

00:43:24.740 And that to me is like one of the most helpful things that I use all the time. Right. So like,

00:43:30.320 for example, I was just doing this crazy challenge. It's called chop wood, carry water,

00:43:33.940 where I split a cord of wood at my house in Flagstaff, and then drove to the Grand Canyon,

00:43:39.500 ran down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, holding these seven gallon water jugs.

00:43:43.320 Yeah. These are the big blue ones, right? Yeah. They weigh like 62 pounds each when they're full.

00:43:47.920 So I was running down there. It's a 10K run, 6.3 mile run down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

00:43:53.460 You drop 5,000 feet and then got to the Colorado river, fill them up and then farmer carry them out of the

00:43:59.680 Grand Canyon. And I remember being down at the bottom and filling up those jugs and just being

00:44:04.560 like looking up and, and having just run all down that. And I was like, what did I get myself into?

00:44:10.820 Like the sun was already getting down super low. And that was the hardest part of the whole challenge

00:44:16.040 for me was like just starting it out. Right. Cause I knew, I knew it was waiting for me. I knew how far

00:44:21.480 I had to go. So just to be clear, you carried 63 pounds in each hand of water up 6.3 miles,

00:44:28.260 basically a grade of, I don't know, seven or 8% I'm guessing, right?

00:44:33.200 Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like 7% grade. Yeah. So 5,000 feet.

00:44:36.560 How long did that take you?

00:44:38.300 Six hours. Yeah, it was a long run.

00:44:41.840 Help me understand what your hands were doing. Were you using grip? Did you have like wraps

00:44:46.160 around your hands or something?

00:44:47.780 No, no, just, just hand in it. I have good calluses on my hands from all the lifting I've

00:44:53.380 been doing, but yeah, I mean, my hands took a beating, but actually interesting. It was

00:44:57.560 more cardio than it was strength. Did you ever have to stop and put them down?

00:45:01.780 Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can only carry them like 50 meters at a time. So it was a lot of carries. Yeah.

00:45:08.760 That is, that is actually more insane than your deadlift 500 pounds, run a five minute mile

00:45:15.040 attempt, which also was super impressive. But this farmer's carry thing is ridiculous. Actually.

00:45:22.120 It was such a crazy experience, you know, but I was talking about reframing and I had to reframe

00:45:30.440 a lot in that, you know, cause I thought I was like, Oh, I think it'll take me like four hours

00:45:33.820 to carry these out. And our goal was to try to beat the sun. But like I said, the sun was already

00:45:38.420 like, it was like three, four o'clock when we got down to the bottom. So I was just like found myself

00:45:43.940 wanting to get frustrated about how this was going, how long this is going to take. I'm never going to

00:45:48.400 get out of here. All those thoughts are going through my mind, you know? And I said to like

00:45:51.780 reframe it and come to peace with like what was happening out there and just accept it and then

00:45:56.960 get excited about it. You know, like I was looking at the moon is coming up is so epic. Like it was

00:46:02.200 dark. All my buddies are there cheering for me, giving me food and water and stuff. And it was just

00:46:06.820 such a beautiful experience, but I had to reframe it to be able to see it that way because how I was

00:46:12.460 seeing it at the bottom of the canyon was like, Oh man, this is going to suck. What I get myself into.

00:46:17.400 I don't know if I can get out of here, like all those negative thoughts. But then as I was able

00:46:21.520 to accept it and then reframe it, then I was able to embrace this really beautiful experience. And

00:46:26.740 one that was life-changing for me that, you know, I'll never forget getting to the top of that canyon

00:46:31.500 and putting those jugs down and how good it felt to like finish that thing, you know, but I had to

00:46:36.160 kind of like change how I was thinking about the whole situation, which is what you have to do

00:46:40.900 when you're in a race and it's not unfolding how it's how you want it to unfold.

00:46:44.620 Well, I can relate to that on a number of my swims where things didn't go well, but you're right.

00:46:50.480 There's something about saying, I'm not going to quit. I'm going to put my head down and I'm

00:46:53.800 going to do this. When you get to the other end, it's pretty remarkable. And I've had the ability

00:46:58.520 to be, you know, coaching people when they do swims and in, in swimming, once you touch the boat

00:47:04.280 or anything, you're disqualified. So it's a very, you can have zero assistance out there. And

00:47:09.560 one of the things that I learned from watching other coaches, and then I would do it with people

00:47:14.200 is whenever a swimmer says they want to quit, I wouldn't let them do it. Right. I would say,

00:47:19.060 no, no, no, I'm not going to let you do this. You got to give me another 10 minutes and then we'll

00:47:24.120 talk again. And if they still want to quit, I say, I need another 10 minutes. And then we talk and

00:47:29.160 I make them do this three times. And part of it is just to show them that they can swim another 30

00:47:35.020 minutes. So if you can swim another 30 minutes, you could probably swim another four hours

00:47:37.960 or whatever the amount is, but also you realize like, and this sounds so cruel, but you also tell

00:47:44.620 them like you, you make sure they understand that what they're doing is you want to quit right now.

00:47:49.800 Just to be clear, you you're, you're saying you want to quit doing this thing right now. Is that

00:47:54.200 right? Yes. Okay. Well, if you know, after 30 minutes, then fine, you can come on out. But I guess

00:47:59.940 there's just no substitute for that feeling of when you, when you finish. Although that, that literally

00:48:05.480 strikes me as the hardest physical thing I could ever imagine doing. Say more about what the cardio

00:48:11.260 struggle of that was like. Are you kind of in a slow jog trot? Like what, what kind of pace were

00:48:16.540 you moving at? Basically a fast walk, you know, you, you want to make your legs and heart do as much

00:48:21.700 of the work as possible. Cause just holding that much weight in your hand becomes an issue, you know,

00:48:26.520 but really the reason why I'd say is even harder than running a marathon is when you're running a

00:48:32.340 marathon, like my heart rates usually around one 67. I have a really low heart rate to begin with.

00:48:37.700 What's your maximum heart rate. I don't know what it'd be now at that time though. I couldn't get it

00:48:42.880 over 200 is probably like one 95, one 97. Like I had a resting heart rate of 27 when I was at my

00:48:50.460 fittest. Like it was, I've always just had a really low heart rate, but it gets super low. Now it's

00:48:55.680 nowhere near that. But all that to say, like usually the first 20 miles of marathon, or maybe the first 17

00:49:01.120 miles, like feels pretty good. You're conversational, you're floating along. Like it's just fun. You

00:49:06.340 know, you're just enjoying the ride. And then of course, like it gets really hard and you got to

00:49:09.700 grit down and bear it. Whereas this was just like, it was like I was doing interval training. Cause I

00:49:14.100 was right. Like I'm going like 30 second carries, set it down, take as minimal rest as possible.

00:49:20.640 And what would a typical rest be when you did that 30 seconds on?

00:49:24.520 Yeah. Like 30 seconds off kind of thing. I would just go to like caught my breath and go again.

00:49:28.920 And so it was like, I'm breathing super hard when I set it down, catch my breath just to where I'm

00:49:34.740 breathing normally again and then go again. So it was just like, I was breathing. If you listen to

00:49:39.120 the video, which we're gonna have a whole video coming out here pretty soon. Like you'll hear me

00:49:43.140 just breathing super hard, like a truck, like the whole time. And it's like six hours straight of

00:49:48.200 doing that was the most intense thing I've ever done before. Like I'm not used to breathing that hard

00:49:53.900 the whole time.

00:49:54.500 How much did you drink? Do you have a sense of what volume you consumed of water and whatever?

00:50:00.240 The amount of water and calories I was taking in was insane. My buddy was helping me. I had a lot

00:50:05.380 of buddies helping me, but one guy was just in charge of doing my food and water. After every third

00:50:09.720 carry, I'm taking in water and then I'm taking in sugar. Like I was eating gummy worms, like a maniac.

00:50:16.580 I probably took in like, like 3000 calories coming up from the Canyon. Cause I was just burning so much.

00:50:22.160 Cause I'm like 183 pounds plus carrying 124 pounds of water weight and you're going up 5,000

00:50:30.180 feet. So my body was just like, my metabolism was unreal, but that was a big part about being

00:50:37.140 and why I wanted to do this. So check this out. Like the biggest, to me, the most important part

00:50:42.740 of training, whether it's run training or weightlifting training is consistency. And it blows my mind what my

00:50:48.620 body's capable of doing and my athletes are capable of doing when you're just consistent. So when I was

00:50:53.700 training for this, I never did longer. Well, twice I did longer, but for the most part, I did 20 minute

00:50:59.480 carries every other day. So that was all the training. I did 20 minute carries 20 minutes with

00:51:06.120 basically the same weight, 60, call it 65 pounds in each hand. And you would do the same thing 30

00:51:10.720 seconds on 30 seconds off 30 seconds on 30 seconds off for 20 minutes. Yep. And then off of that,

00:51:16.300 I was able to do a six hour carry out of the Canyon. And did you do that at grade as well?

00:51:20.760 Not on flat, just flat, which, you know, like I could have trained for it better, but like,

00:51:27.000 I'm a full-time dad. I got my lifting that I'm into. I coach my wife. I have online training

00:51:32.100 business run free training. So I have a ton of stuff going on. I don't have time to go do like

00:51:35.740 our water carries, but plus it's easy to be consistent when it's 20 minutes, right? Like I can't

00:51:40.780 find an excuse and be like, Oh, I don't have 20 minutes. Like I would get home late at night and put

00:51:45.400 on the headlamp. And if I hadn't done my carry, go do my carry. Cause 20 minutes is nothing. Right.

00:51:50.000 I can be consistent with that. Whereas if I'm trying to be like, okay, every other day,

00:51:53.480 I'm gonna do an hour. Nope. I'm not gonna be able to stick to that. You know? So I think a big part

00:51:57.620 about being successful in running fitness is like, just make the bar low, make it easy to be consistent.

00:52:04.060 Right. So yeah, I did all of that off 20 minute carries, but I knew what is super important in doing

00:52:08.960 any kind of ultra stuff is fueling. So I knew I was like, if I take in enough calories and I stay

00:52:14.640 hydrated, I'm going to be okay. I can get through anything. But how much did you need to experiment

00:52:19.040 with that? Because that was something I experimented with a lot in my own very, very, very modest forms

00:52:25.760 of endurance training was learning the fuel and making dumb mistakes. Sometimes like this, I did this

00:52:33.400 one training swim many years ago and it was like kind of your penultimate, like it was the longest

00:52:38.820 training swim I would do before the actual swim. So it was like a 24 mile swim. So I did an 18 mile

00:52:44.780 was the last training swim. And someone had told me, Hey, a really good way to avoid getting the runs

00:52:52.260 is to take like, I forget what it is. Like. Imodium. Imodium. Yeah, exactly. It was Imodium.

00:52:57.760 And I was like, well, you know, it's funny. I've never had the runs when swimming, but I'd hate to get it.

00:53:02.020 I should try. I just see what happens if I take Imodium before this swim. So sure enough. And of

00:53:07.640 course, like an idiot, I don't just take the recommended dose. I take 2X the recommended dose.

00:53:12.140 And so I'm out there. And I think at that time, my regimen was 200 ML of fluid every 20 minutes.

00:53:20.500 So 600 ML an hour of fluid multiplied by, I think that turned into a seven, maybe an eight hour swim.

00:53:28.960 And the last four miles, I was about, I thought I was going to die. Like I was so bloated and it

00:53:40.100 didn't really occur to me why. Cause it was like, you know, eight hours earlier that I had taken the

00:53:43.800 Imodium, right? Like I had never put two and two together. This was the problem. So we finally,

00:53:48.480 we started in La Jolla, swam up to like, I don't know, Solana beach and then swam back down.

00:53:53.460 And when, when we get back to shore and my friend who is guiding me pulls the kayak on the beach and

00:54:00.120 I pick up the kayak to carry it with him. So I'm in the front of the kayak, he's in the back,

00:54:03.900 we're carrying it on the beach. It's like this beautiful day in La Jolla. Families are playing

00:54:08.180 everywhere. This kid had dug a big hole in the ground next to his sandcastle. And as we walked

00:54:15.020 by it, I just went and I just puked like literally, it looked like eight liters of whatever it was I

00:54:23.420 was drinking, like hammer strength, something or other, like into this hole. And I was like,

00:54:28.240 all right, note to self, man. Imodium, not for swims, but that's a dumb example. But like

00:54:35.280 you mentioned like the amount of sugar you're consuming, but I know some athletes who just cannot

00:54:40.360 put sugar in, they get really sick. They have to use more complex carbohydrates. So

00:54:45.860 how empirical were you both? Let's go back to your marathon training when it was,

00:54:50.400 everything's on the line. This is your job. How deliberate were you in figuring out what was the

00:54:55.160 right ratio of goo versus rice versus potato versus all of it in liquid? How did you figure all that out?

00:55:02.440 I mean, we were super specific with it when I was running professionally. And I think,

00:55:05.880 you know, the running professionally, my experiences there carried over into this challenge,

00:55:09.980 right? So from my experience and a lot of our athletes experience, like you can train your gut

00:55:14.800 to take in stuff. It's when you throw new stuff at it that it's not used to when you have, you know,

00:55:19.260 adverse reactions like you're having. For us, number one, I'm loading for two days before the

00:55:25.380 marathon. And that was taken from like a nutritionist that I was working with. He's like,

00:55:28.860 hey, listen, like spread this load out. Like you don't want to blow it up and like be feeling

00:55:32.960 terrible the day before this race load for two days leading up to it. So what that would look like is I'd

00:55:37.960 eat 400 calories of carbohydrate additional to what I'd normally eat when I'm training hard,

00:55:43.560 right? So it wouldn't be like, oh, I'm not running that much the last couple of days. So I'm going to

00:55:47.280 cut down how much I'm eating. I would still eat like I was training and the 400 extra calories of

00:55:53.180 carb. And I keep those carbs super simple because, you know, like a lot's going on with nerves and

00:55:58.080 jitters leading up to your race. You just want to make it as easy on your system. There's a time and

00:56:02.860 place for complex carbs and high fiber diet and all that stuff. Like usually that's like how we're

00:56:07.680 eating. But the days before race, we're keeping it super, super simple, right? With the carb intake.

00:56:13.320 I was big on like the white rice, pasta, sourdough bread. I really like because it's lower glycemic index,

00:56:20.340 but digest really easy. Maltodextrin is a carb that I really like to take in. You got to be careful.

00:56:26.640 I've had some bad experiences with other branded stuff. It's like, it's supposed to like,

00:56:33.120 like, I forget what it's called, like glucose aid or one of those things. I tried that before

00:56:37.660 racing. My athletes try it and they had a terrible time with their stomach. So you never want to try

00:56:42.040 something new leading up to your race. You haven't tried before. So always try it in training. That's

00:56:46.000 just like a given, you know, but I love maltodextrin because it's a liquid calorie. So if I'm not hungry

00:56:51.520 and it's tasteless, I can mix it up with the protein powder, shake it up, shoot it down.

00:56:55.540 So for you, that was what rice and potatoes.

00:56:58.220 That's actually what my pre-race meal was, was a liquid meal because I'd wake up from all this

00:57:03.300 carb loading I'm doing the day before. And I'd wake up really full and then I'd eat anyways.

00:57:07.460 So like three hours before the race, take my shake with the protein powder, maltodextrin,

00:57:12.660 a little bit of olive oil in there as a healthy fat to help slow things down a little bit more.

00:57:17.460 And then I was taking a gel right on the starting line, sipping on water the whole time.

00:57:21.980 And then we would actually, how I did my bottles and we get, so we get bottles every 5k. So we get

00:57:28.900 to put them out on a table. You can put whatever you want in it. You could strap a gel to it if you

00:57:32.760 want. But how I always did things is we would make them not very concentrated the first bottle,

00:57:38.800 and then they'd get increasingly concentrated as the race was going on. And then they get

00:57:43.000 decreasingly concentrated later in the race. And the reason for that was it's easier to absorb

00:57:48.520 things when you're not as tired. So you kind of want to make sure you're front loading your

00:57:53.480 carb intake during a marathon because your body can just process it a lot easier. I mean,

00:57:58.140 when you get to 40k of marathon, like you don't feel like taking in carbs at all. So oftentimes

00:58:02.520 we grab that bottle, we take a swig of it, and then it tricks your body to think it's getting carbs.

00:58:08.700 And then we just spit it out. We wouldn't even drink it, but your body thinks, oh, carbs are on the

00:58:12.860 way. Like, and it responds like as if it's going to get carbs, but doesn't get anything. So

00:58:16.900 that would give you a little jolt of energy just with 2k to go there. But typically, yeah,

00:58:21.160 the bottles would be not as concentrated, more concentrated. We put a gel at 15k and a gel at

00:58:26.920 30k. And that gel at 30k would be a caffeinated gel. Again, just to get a little bit more of a

00:58:31.760 hit of caffeine. We time our caffeine intake to where we're taking it also like 75 minutes prior

00:58:37.620 to race start. Yeah. And caffeine is a really interesting thing to talk about. I'm like intrigued by

00:58:42.500 that one because that was one of the things that when it came on board is like, oh, there's

00:58:47.680 no going back. Like I couldn't imagine doing a race without caffeine. And yet, like people

00:58:52.020 have such different experiences with it. You know, I've learned from like science recently

00:58:56.340 how it does like increase your core temperature, which is kind of detrimental to endurance activities.

00:59:01.700 But the thing that's interesting is I understand the science behind that. But that just hasn't

00:59:06.520 been my experience at all. Like I am 100% faster with caffeine on board than without caffeine on

00:59:12.380 board. And I've tried both ways. Did you ever experiment with Tylenol?

00:59:16.660 No, no, I never did. So there's some really interesting research. And I was actually talking

00:59:20.560 about this like a couple of weeks ago with Lance Armstrong. I don't know how it came up,

00:59:23.920 but we were talking about the same thing. Like he had never used Tylenol on the tour.

00:59:28.180 It's a pretty remarkable performance enhancing drug. Perfectly legal, right? WADA has not banned

00:59:33.220 Tylenol to my knowledge, but we're talking about like a one to 2% performance boost.

00:59:38.260 Wow. It's not entirely clear if it comes through the temperature reduction or the pain reduction,

00:59:45.200 but it was absolutely part of my stack during time trials. Interesting.

00:59:51.800 So, you know, a time trial is like basically an hour of threshold, right? It's super painful.

00:59:57.160 And I feel like I was getting like a one, two, maybe even at times a 3% performance

01:00:02.980 gain from Tylenol. And I would take like a thousand milligrams an hour before the race.

01:00:08.740 Interesting.

01:00:09.540 So I'm curious if other athletes have tried that.

01:00:11.900 I'm not familiar with other athletes trying it, but I'm definitely going to try that with

01:00:15.160 my athletes now. Yeah, I would give it a try. And again, it's, we don't even really know how

01:00:19.100 Tylenol works. So it's for such a common medication. We don't actually understand its

01:00:23.200 mechanism of action, but it is a very good medication at keeping temperature down,

01:00:27.920 which is obviously its first indication is to lower it, you know, for fever,

01:00:30.920 but it also reduces pain and it does it in a way that's different from NSAIDs and outside of

01:00:36.560 needing to be careful on the dose, because obviously it is a, it's a very liver toxic

01:00:40.480 drug at high doses, but within normal amounts, like, you know, a thousand milligrams, you know,

01:00:44.920 it's an incredibly safe drug. And it would be curious to know how much of a benefit your

01:00:49.660 athletes would get on that and how much you would get from it.

01:00:52.180 Yeah, I'll try that. Is there any application to lifting if it's keeping your core temperature

01:00:56.680 down? I'd seem that'd be helpful for lifting as well.

01:00:59.420 I don't know. I haven't seen the literature on lifting, you know, where I did see literature

01:01:03.060 on lifting and this is freaking hilarious. This was probably like eight years ago. I saw some

01:01:07.700 papers that looked at how Viagra improved lifting performance. So of course I went out and got a ton

01:01:14.400 of Viagra and in the end I couldn't do it because not for the reasons that most people would imagine.

01:01:20.240 The reason I couldn't do it is just the symptoms. I was getting so lightheaded from it because it's a

01:01:24.820 vasodilator in part. Yeah. My blood pressure is not that high. It's actually kind of low. And so maybe I just

01:01:30.800 couldn't tolerate the sort of lightheadedness that came from it. But the research was actually pretty

01:01:35.860 compelling at 25 to 50 milligrams of Viagra boosting strength performance and not just strength.

01:01:42.200 Actually, if I recall, it was more of muscular endurance, not strength actually.

01:01:47.380 Okay.

01:01:48.100 And I didn't find the difference because of the symptoms that I had because of the side effects,

01:01:52.080 but that might be another thing worth experimenting with is kind of that 25 to 50 milligrams of Viagra

01:01:57.540 to see what does that do as far as not a mean maximal effort, but a sub-maximal effort repeatedly.

01:02:04.600 So probably you'd see more of that on your best 10 rep deadlift as opposed to your max deadlift.

01:02:10.380 Okay. That's interesting. So speaking of core temperature, have you played at all with Palmer

01:02:15.100 cooling? No. Are you familiar with that at all? No. I mean, I used to check my core temp before and

01:02:20.920 after long swims because we had the opposite problem. You're swimming in cold water. So sometimes I'd

01:02:26.660 actually swim with a rectal probe just to see. And usually your temp would drop like four,

01:02:32.280 four, five degrees. So you'd start at 98 or 99 and I'd come out of the water at 93, 94.

01:02:39.920 Huh.

01:02:40.600 You were getting a performance detriment when your temperature went too low. So really,

01:02:44.520 we really operate in this pretty narrow band of temperature, right? Too much and too little is

01:02:49.060 pretty bad.

01:02:50.400 Right. Yeah. It's interesting. Like Dr. Huberman out of Stanford, neuroscientist,

01:02:54.840 he talks about Palmer cooling. So we've been playing with that a little bit. Like there's some

01:02:58.520 pretty remarkable research coming out of Stanford about the effects of that, both in strength,

01:03:02.280 training, and in the endurance space. It's a little bit harder.

01:03:04.860 So how does it work?

01:03:06.480 So the best way is to dump heat, core temp through your body is through your face,

01:03:11.960 your upper face where there's no hair. And then also through your hands and the bottom of your feet.

01:03:16.480 So they developed this glove and they've had this for years. Like this was there at Stanford when we

01:03:21.440 were coming out. And you put your hands in this glove and you dump heat. And the thing is you don't

01:03:26.380 want it too cold, right? So you don't want it like icy cold, just cool. So that doesn't dilate

01:03:31.200 vasodilation or constrict. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. And so then you're dumping all your heat

01:03:36.940 out, brings your core temp down, and then you're good to go after that. So we've been playing a

01:03:41.940 little bit with that, with like holding cold packs in your hands and in between lifts, like holding

01:03:47.040 cold things or putting your hands in cool water, dumping your temp. And that's, that's kind of like one

01:03:51.400 thing that we're playing with a little bit more, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It's like why

01:03:54.720 humans can do these persistence hunts, you know, where they go and chase down animals. It's because

01:03:59.300 the animal like overheats. It's not as good at dumping temperature, whereas like humans are

01:04:03.700 better at regulating temperature. So if you can keep your temperature in that kind of optimal range,

01:04:08.420 in theory, it should like increase your endurance as well. So yeah, there's always like, I love like

01:04:13.820 exploring this stuff and trying new tactics out like that. So when you mention this now, I do recall,

01:04:18.240 I have experimented with this, with what's called a cooling helmet. So I had this helmet,

01:04:23.180 it had inserts into it that you would put in the freezer. So like gel packs that you would freeze

01:04:27.920 and you would put this thing on your head. So I would ride on my trainer with this cooling helmet

01:04:32.760 and it definitely made a difference, but I never, for some reason I could never bring myself to do it

01:04:40.280 like in a race or something like that. But the other thing I've noticed on that effect was just this

01:04:45.720 summer. So this was my first summer living in Austin. And obviously it gets super hot in Austin

01:04:51.040 in the summer, hotter than I'm used to in Southern California. And when I drive a race car, I've never

01:04:57.960 used any form of cooling device before. So I've always just drive, you got a fire suit on, so you

01:05:02.680 have no max suit on, you got a race suit on. And especially when you drive a closed cockpit car,

01:05:08.560 so not a formula car, you're not getting the wind as you're driving. And of course these cars are hot

01:05:13.940 as hell because these are race cars. There's no air conditioning and you're just, you've got all

01:05:18.280 this engine heat coming at you. So you really get hot. And I've always just sort of suffered through

01:05:22.980 this, even though so many people I know say invest in a cooling vest. So you have these vests that run

01:05:29.120 ice water around your torso. And I was like, ah, I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't need

01:05:33.540 that. I got this. I got this. I got this. And then finally one day my friend was like, dude,

01:05:36.740 just try it. I mean, game changer, total game changer to drive a racing car with a cooling

01:05:45.220 vest on under hot conditions. So tell me more about this cooling vest. Cause we play with these

01:05:50.600 things as well. I have kind of like the archaic ones that it's like, you put it, you fill it up,

01:05:55.540 it turns into gel and then you freeze it. And it's just like, it's slowly like gets back to temperature,

01:06:00.120 but do these, do you actually like plug them in or how does it stay cool?

01:06:03.400 Yeah. This would not be great for a runner because it would be too heavy, but so it's,

01:06:08.640 it's a shirt actually. And it has really, really fine, whatever little cables running up and down

01:06:14.880 it. And it, it has a little box that runs cold water through you up and down, up and down, up and

01:06:21.920 down. And in the car, it's easy. You just, you have a power unit, you're running it out of the car.

01:06:26.020 It did occur to me, like, is there a way, like, let's say the thing weighs an extra six pounds.

01:06:31.780 What would be the cost trade-off if you were on a bike with one of these things? Like,

01:06:35.500 could one of these things be engineered to only add like maybe four or five pounds,

01:06:40.080 which would of course be detrimental on the bike, but would it offset by the performance gain you'd

01:06:44.820 have? But obviously in a car, it's an enormous performance booster, especially in closed cockpit

01:06:50.260 cars and formula cars. It's not as big a deal because you don't get as hot. You like, you're getting

01:06:54.160 so much air blown on you, but it blew my mind. What a difference the temperature would make in terms of

01:07:00.240 performance and everything. Like, even like that night when you're done, the difference between

01:07:05.320 the day you use it and the day you don't is, is the difference between feeling like you're going to

01:07:08.900 die and feeling like, yeah, I'm tired, but I'm, I'm okay. Yeah. And I bet you're like mentally in a

01:07:14.400 lot better place too, right? It's like when you're all super hot or super cold, it's so easy to go mental

01:07:20.020 really quick. So I bet it helps a ton for you, like your focus as well. For sure. And even little

01:07:25.360 silly things, like just like you're, you're perspiring less. And even though you wear like

01:07:30.180 a head sock, a balaclava, like, you know, anytime sweat is getting in your eyes, it's super annoying.

01:07:35.120 You want to keep your hands on the steering wheel. So, and anything that they can get around that.

01:07:39.700 But so how do you implement that in a runner then? Like, obviously I can see how in strength

01:07:44.280 training you can use that. But if you're training a guy to run a marathon, how can you incorporate

01:07:50.120 any of these cooling things into the actual race? Yeah. So I think part of it is like,

01:07:55.560 especially for guys who train in hot and humid places is just having it available beforehand.

01:08:00.840 Right. So at least like after you do your warmup, you do your drills and strides,

01:08:04.420 you're getting your core temperature back down by doing some heat dumping with your hands.

01:08:08.260 And then if you're doing training such as interval training, you know, you can get it in between sets.

01:08:13.400 So I'll have like a bucket of cold water at the track and just between sets, go put your hands in

01:08:18.440 there, dump a bunch of heat and then back at it. And it, it definitely, I feel like it makes a big

01:08:23.420 difference. You know, I feel like it's super helpful, but in terms of like applying it while

01:08:26.900 you're actually running, that's where you got to get more creative. So we've done things with like

01:08:30.620 these packs that you break, you know, those instant cold packs, break those open and just hold them.

01:08:35.460 And you don't, you only have to do it for like, I think like two minutes is kind of ideal to hold

01:08:40.300 them for that long, which is kind of a long time. That's kind of a hindrance, but if it's worth the trade

01:08:44.260 and you're getting the performance benefit from it, then it's, you know, maybe worth it.

01:08:47.880 But yeah, like, I'm curious, I haven't tried the gloves that they have at Stanford that they use

01:08:52.920 on the football team and a lot of the athletic programs. But again, like you can't stop your run

01:08:57.940 in the middle of a race and put your hands in some cold glove, but who knows like what the

01:09:02.360 application could be. It just requires somebody to get creative with it, you know, and figure out a

01:09:06.440 way to make it more applicable to running. Like when you're mentioning like the biking, I was like,

01:09:10.520 oh, it'd be cool if they could make like somehow the handles be colder, you know, put some kind of

01:09:15.220 technology in there. So then you're getting polymer cooling while your hands are on the

01:09:19.380 handles, like things like that. They can find a way to do it in a lightweight way. It could be

01:09:23.240 like really powerful, you know? Yeah. That's actually a great idea. If it could be done again,

01:09:27.720 really light because these days, most bikes are coming in at below the UCI limit of whatever it is

01:09:33.660 now, 14.9 pounds. So most cyclists actually have to add ballast to their bikes, you know, in the

01:09:39.340 Tour de France, like most cyclists are actually adding weight to their bikes to get them up to legal weight.

01:09:44.420 So yeah, there's definitely a bit of room to play with there. I don't know how much, but

01:09:47.400 that would be pretty cool. So speaking of Stanford, that's where you go to college.

01:09:51.120 I assume you were recruited very heavily to every top running powerhouse program there was, right?

01:09:58.020 Yeah. Yeah. Which was cool because I was in the middle of five kids growing up and my dad was a

01:10:02.360 teacher. My mom's a stay-at-home mom. So we were always like pinching pennies. So I knew like part of

01:10:07.560 running for me is like, if I'm going to go to a good college, like I'm going to have to earn my way

01:10:11.380 there kind of thing, you know? So yeah, it was pretty cool to like be getting recruited all over

01:10:15.900 the place. And it's funny because Stanford was the one place I was like, I'm definitely not going to

01:10:19.200 Stanford because I wasn't heavily focused on academics in high school. I knew the academics,

01:10:24.640 like they don't cut slack to athletes there. Like we're in it just like everyone else, you know,

01:10:29.300 like there's not a lot of special assistants going on. So I knew it'd be like academically a super big

01:10:34.200 challenge for me as well as like the athletic part. And I was like, I don't know. I just don't want to

01:10:38.720 put myself in that kind of a challenging space. And it was super challenging. Like it was three

01:10:44.280 years of really big struggle. And then, you know, I hit one cross country season really well,

01:10:50.140 was a part of a NCAA winning team, two years there in cross country. And then my, my fourth year at

01:10:56.500 Stanford, things just clicked. And that's the thing I love about running and fitness in general. It's

01:11:00.700 like everything can be going so wrong for so long. And then yet, like when, when things start to

01:11:06.700 click, it's such a good feeling when you push through and you get to that point where it's

01:11:10.460 just common, you know, the weights coming off the ground easy. And it's such a cool feeling.

01:11:15.200 That was the sensation I had during that fourth year, me and my teammate Ian Dobson went one,

01:11:19.660 two, um, in track. And at that point, like I was, I was having a very lackluster career at Stanford.

01:11:25.620 I'd never even been to NCAA championships in track, but again, in running, it doesn't matter,

01:11:30.960 right? It's just you and the clock and the other guys out there and everything was clicking.

01:11:34.680 We went one, two NCs and all of a sudden it was like deals are coming in and I had the opportunity

01:11:39.540 to run professionally. And I'm saying for my wife, Sarah, and we, we, I was planning on coming back

01:11:44.840 for a fifth year, but because things clicked so well that year, I'd seen some of my other teammates

01:11:49.200 come through Stanford, have a really good fourth year and then not do well their fifth year and then

01:11:54.060 have no contract. Right. Did you redshirt your first year? Yeah. I redshirt my freshman year. I was,

01:11:59.660 like I said, I was on the struggle bus. I was hurt. I was injured. I was sick. I'd get poison oak every

01:12:05.940 winter. Like it was like the, the perfect combination of everything going wrong. I was

01:12:10.140 struggling academically. I was struggling with depression, actually left Stanford for a quarter

01:12:15.140 of my sophomore year. Wasn't sure if I was going to go back. You know, I thought in that situation

01:12:20.340 that I could change what was going on inside of my head and heart by changing my location. So I was

01:12:25.640 like, I'm going to go back home. The last place, everything was clicking for me and everything was

01:12:29.720 working. I was sick of the struggle, you know, and I went back home and got even more depressed.

01:12:34.280 And I was like, well, that, that was stupid. Like go back to, to where I knew I was supposed to be.

01:12:39.980 And that was Stanford. So I went back there and then things gradually started to get better. And,

01:12:45.100 but yeah, I had my struggles at Stanford, you know, like it was a beautiful place to go to school,

01:12:49.580 love the people, the environment. I still like to go back and visit there, but it was for the most part,

01:12:55.260 like a big, big struggle in, in all areas, athletically, academically. But again, I hit it

01:13:01.680 that fourth year and then the doors came open to, to run professionally and left the farm after that.

01:13:07.760 What do you think changed and clicked? Like what, what do you think you were struggling with

01:13:11.720 from a running perspective? Cause I think in high school you ran a four Oh two mile,

01:13:16.380 which I know you wanted to break that four minute barrier, which is pretty rarefied air.

01:13:21.360 It's isn't Jim Ryan and Alan Webb, the only two to do that. Or has someone else now broken four

01:13:26.400 minutes for the mile in high school? So yeah, at the time when I was running,

01:13:30.800 there was only four guys who had done it. So yeah, Jim Ryan, two other guys blanking on their

01:13:36.060 name, then Alan. And, uh, you know, I was the same year you mentioned swimming with Alan. I love

01:13:39.960 Alan, like good friends with him, such a good dude. But yeah, I remember watching him run three 53 at

01:13:45.540 and it was just like, my head exploded. It was like, I can't believe I just saw that. That was

01:13:51.400 just like out of this world. That was unbelievable. And then he went to Michigan and struggled, right?

01:13:56.880 Yep. He struggled his sophomore year. Yeah. Him and I like have a lot of parallels,

01:14:00.560 even like the year that we both hit it big 2007. He set the AR in the, in the mile. I set the AR in

01:14:07.500 the half and we were like crossing paths all the time too. Like I was his roommate over in Europe in

01:14:12.560 2006 when we were over there racing that summer, we were both struggling for various reasons, but

01:14:18.880 we both have very high highs and very low lows. Alan and I are pretty similar that way, you know,

01:14:24.860 but he's definitely like one of the most talented runners I've ever seen. Like the amount of talent

01:14:30.320 that guy has, he just, he, he has such a good work ethic that sometimes it comes back to bite him.

01:14:35.600 Like we'd be on the track in Europe and he'd go to does his run and then he's doing like hurdle drills

01:14:40.640 and plyos and all this stuff for like hours afterwards. And we're all like have left and

01:14:45.880 we're showered up and eating and he's like still out there grinding. Right. So he just like would

01:14:50.660 be so intensely focused that when it was clicking, it was great. But I think sometimes he kind of

01:14:55.860 overcooked himself a little bit, but man, such an immense talent. And it was so cool to get to see

01:15:01.380 him have his moment, you know, run three 46 for the mile was, he was just, he was insane that year.

01:15:07.160 He was just on fire. He's just untouchable. If, if the Olympics would have been that year,

01:15:10.920 he'd been a gold medalist, like without a doubt. Do you remember his Olympic trials in

01:15:14.820 Oh four in Sacramento when he just ran away from the field? Like I, you know, that's again,

01:15:20.260 just one of those moments I remember. Cause that, that was actually the summer that I,

01:15:23.900 I think Oh three and Oh four were the summers that I saw him the most at the pool. And like,

01:15:30.140 you wouldn't believe that that was a 1500 in terms of the margin of victory he had over those guys.

01:15:34.200 Right. Like that looked like a 5,000 or a 10 K in terms of how far ahead he was of everybody else.

01:15:40.220 Yeah. I mean, he was so dominant when he was on, like people weren't beating him. He was,

01:15:45.280 he was impossible to beat. So he was fun to watch in his, in his prime.

01:15:49.440 So what do you think changed in your senior year?

01:15:52.120 Oh yeah. Yeah. We were talking about that.

01:15:53.900 I know I keep distracting you. I'm, I'm, I keep, I'm doing a horrible job here today. I keep

01:15:57.780 taking us on these tangents and I just, yeah, this is more of a dinner conversation than a podcast.

01:16:02.180 Yeah, no, I like it. I like it. So funny thing is, I'm always very concerned with the nuts and

01:16:09.240 bolts of training, what I'm doing, right. That's always my focus as an athlete. And yet what I've

01:16:14.500 kind of the lesson that I've had to learn from the time I've gotten into sports since a kid until now

01:16:19.740 at 39 is like, it's way more important how I do what I'm doing, meaning like my heart condition,

01:16:25.760 what's going on in my head than what I'm actually doing. So like, for example, like my tendency is to

01:16:31.640 try to prove myself in training to myself. Like I'm not really trying to prove myself to anyone

01:16:36.000 else. I just want to know I'm fit. I'm ready to go. Right. So oftentimes I'll come to these workouts

01:16:40.160 and I'm racing them. It's like, I'm going head down, like all out, like everything I have inside

01:16:45.900 me. Oftentimes I'm going harder in training than I'm going in racing. Right. And yet like, that is

01:16:51.000 not the best way for my body to absorb the work. Like I need to be making deposits, not making

01:16:56.200 withdrawals when I'm training. So if I, if I go into these workouts confident in who I am

01:17:01.040 knowing the purpose of the workout, then I'm in a much better place. I'm absorbing the training a

01:17:07.020 lot better. So what happened to answer your question was my identity was all wrapped up in

01:17:12.880 my performances. Right. So, and that's why I struggle with depression is I look in the mirror

01:17:16.980 in the morning, I was struggling with my running. I was hurt. I was frustrated with how things were

01:17:21.580 going. I wasn't getting better. And so I just saw myself as a failure and is very difficult to have

01:17:27.460 that happen every single morning, get up, look in the mirror, failure, failure, failure, failure,

01:17:32.300 you know? And so when I went back home, like my faith has always been a huge part of my life.

01:17:37.420 And, uh, I started to realize like, I need to see myself, how God sees me and how God sees me

01:17:43.880 has nothing to do with my performance. Right. It's like, think about like your kids, right? Like

01:17:47.580 you don't really care how good they are at a certain sport, right? Like you love them.

01:17:51.780 Right. It's unconditional who they are. Yeah. And so like, can I love myself that same way?

01:17:57.300 Oftentimes, like we're able to love other people and treat other people a lot better than we

01:18:01.180 actually treat ourself in our mind, you know? And so I started to kind of get to the bottom of that

01:18:05.600 and be like, you know what? Like God loves me regardless of how I do. So I'm going to choose

01:18:10.240 on a daily basis. It wasn't a one-time thing. It's still something I have to cultivate to this day.

01:18:15.140 Like, I'm going to choose to love myself regardless of how I'm performing, right? Like what

01:18:19.460 really makes me special has nothing to do with how fast I am or how much weight I can lift or any of

01:18:24.360 those things. And as that began to sink in, it took all the pressure off myself. Like I was just

01:18:31.060 carrying around this like heavy burden to every single workout, every single race. Cause if I wasn't

01:18:36.160 proving to myself that I was important by running fast, I was hating myself. Right. And so as I took

01:18:42.140 these weights off and be like, no, actually I'm cool with who I am. Like, I actually, I love myself

01:18:46.400 whether I have a great workout or a bad workout that just took the weights off. And it also made me

01:18:51.120 fearless too. It's like, okay, now I can go out and just air it out and I'm going to fail a bunch

01:18:55.980 of times and I can live with that. I'm okay with that. Right. So there's something powerful about

01:19:01.160 coming to peace with the worst case scenario. And it might sound like a place you shouldn't go

01:19:06.020 before a race, but oftentimes I do like to go there. I'm like, okay, like I could go out with

01:19:10.840 all these African guys, go out under 62 minutes for the half marathon in route to a marathon at

01:19:16.920 Boston. I might blow up, might not work out like, but Hey, I know I can handle that. I know I'm okay.

01:19:23.400 I'm cool with myself if that happens and I'm gonna give myself a shot to like, and I think that's what

01:19:29.080 we're kind of lacking for a lot of American distance runners is the willingness to put

01:19:35.220 yourself out there to take a big risk. And that's what the Africans, their mentality is just like,

01:19:40.000 no, you just go with the lead group. And if you blow up, don't take it personally, get up and go

01:19:45.020 again the next time. Right. Like they don't take their failures personally. Whereas like Americans

01:19:49.520 myself, like I take it super personally, right? If I fail, that means I'm a failure for them. It's

01:19:54.560 like, if they fail, like it, that's just a part of the process. Who cares? Like, just go again,

01:19:59.240 you know? So as those weights were able to come off me, I brought my approach to workouts, to races

01:20:04.820 change. Things started to click a lot better. A big thing is I learned also to like, I didn't have

01:20:10.160 to beat my work, my teammates in training anymore. Like I could just work with them. I didn't have to

01:20:14.880 try to drop them. Even if I could drop them, I was like, I don't need to like, I'm secure in who I

01:20:20.120 am, you know? So that was a huge shift. But again, it wasn't like all of a sudden I

01:20:24.420 bam, bam, the results came. It was like years and years. And then it turned into something.

01:20:30.060 So that was really the most freeing thing I think I've experienced in my career in terms of

01:20:34.720 what's going on internally that freed me up to enter into my full potential in running.

01:20:41.020 And despite how much of just this kind of very friendly person you are, I would imagine that

01:20:45.680 you kind of alienated a lot of teammates when you came in with that mode of every workout is hammer time.

01:20:52.320 Yes, 100%. Like I would go home over the summer and usually it's supposed to be kind of like chill

01:20:58.300 base building training. Right. And I would just train my brains out and I would come back and I

01:21:03.220 would just be blasting everyone all the time. Yeah. I remember talking to now like one of my good

01:21:08.440 friends and teammates, Ian Dobson, and he's a big reason why I did so well coming out of Stanford

01:21:12.880 in my first years as a pro runner. He's like, dude, yeah, we used to like not be a fan. Like you're

01:21:17.600 just always trying to like, like you'd always come back in super good shape and you're always

01:21:21.400 taking it to us. And that changed. Like as I was able to work with guys, I got along a lot better

01:21:26.580 with them. And I just learned, like, just communicate with people. Right. Like if I tell

01:21:30.520 these guys, like I'm working out with my teammates, Hey guys, like I'm feeling really good. I'm gonna go a

01:21:34.000 little bit quicker if that's cool. That's a lot different than just like taking off without saying

01:21:38.460 anything. So for people who are working out in like group environments, like it's crazy just how that

01:21:44.060 little communication within the group can really shift things, the dynamics of the group and make

01:21:49.020 it to where like, everyone's cool with what's happening. And you're not just like throwing in

01:21:53.000 random surges. And there's a lot of that that goes on and running within groups. Like there's

01:21:58.400 races and different characters and people who can't work out in groups. And it gets, it gets a little

01:22:03.800 bit intense at times, but if, if the communication is there, like guys can work together and actually

01:22:08.520 make each other better. So when you turn pro is that what? Oh five. Yeah. And I think your lead

01:22:14.440 sponsors, a six at the time, right? Yep. Correct. So had it entered your mind yet that you would find

01:22:21.720 your sweet spot in this half marathon to marathon world, or were you still thinking, you know, I'm

01:22:26.320 going to be a 5k, 10k guy. Like what were you thinking? You know, five was going to be the place

01:22:30.600 where you would make your mark. Yeah. So I never thought I'd run a marathon. I grew up like loving the

01:22:36.480 movie pre Fontaine and you know, that scene where he's like, no, one's going to tell me I'm not fast

01:22:40.820 enough, you know, but like the truth is like, I wasn't fast enough that I wanted to be a miler.

01:22:46.420 Right. And kind of like what we're chatting about earlier, the importance of speed. It's like only

01:22:50.940 having, I ran 50 for 400 in high school, but only having that kind of speed limited my upper end

01:22:58.100 potential. I mean, in the 5,000 meters guys are closing in 52. So if your top end speed is 50,

01:23:04.360 you're going to have a hard time closing in 52, right? Your best 5k is like 13, 16, 16. Yeah.

01:23:12.020 And put that in perspective. What's the American record in the 5k?

01:23:16.080 Good question. Where's that now? It's around 1250, give or take. Okay.

01:23:20.960 So at the time, like that was one of the faster times coming out of college, you know, things are

01:23:25.600 definitely shifting a lot with the new shoe technology and stuff in terms of times.

01:23:30.120 But yeah, at the time, like that was a pretty solid run. So, and that's why like coming off

01:23:35.900 the wake of that, I spent a year professionally just focusing on the 5k, didn't improve at all

01:23:42.080 over the 5k. My 5k stayed roughly the same. I think I ran like 1320 something, 1322 the next year.

01:23:49.360 And the Beijing Olympics were kind of on the horizon. The trials was coming up the following year.

01:23:54.460 And it's kind of one of those things where I was like, I got to figure out my vision for my running

01:23:58.420 was always to run with the best guys in the world. And what event not, am I going to be most

01:24:02.820 competitive in here? And you know, I'm 23 years old. I got to figure this out. And so I, there was

01:24:08.420 all of a sudden an openness to longer distances. Whereas before I'd always been, like I said,

01:24:12.780 very closed minded, just being like, I'm just want to be a world-class miler like Alan was.

01:24:17.680 So how many half marathons had you run before Houston in 07?

01:24:21.800 Zero.

01:24:22.720 That was your first half marathon.

01:24:24.280 Yeah. That was my first, I had run a couple of 20ks, which is essentially the same thing. It's

01:24:28.900 like a K less. Right. So, but yeah, I got worked on the track that first year and I'll never forget.

01:24:34.780 I was in London. I was racing against Bekele, which is the world record holder at the time over 5,000

01:24:39.440 meters. I remember I was coming down the backstretch of the track and I was watching on the Jumbotron

01:24:44.300 Bekele and Craig Mottram, an Australian guy finishing in this kicking duel. And I was like nowhere even close

01:24:50.980 to him. Right. And it was kind of like one of those moments of being like, yeah, this isn't,

01:24:55.160 this isn't my best event, like a moment of realization. So then that openness allowed me

01:24:59.320 to start experimenting with longer stuff. So I went home that summer, started training for some longer

01:25:04.300 distance stuff, did the world 20k championships, the U S national 20k champs, and it was clicking

01:25:09.680 pretty well. And then I got into marathon training over the winter, over the late fall slash winter.

01:25:16.520 And Houston was just supposed to be like a check-in along the way. Let's see how this

01:25:20.760 marathon training is going. I was planning on debuting at the Los Angeles marathon because

01:25:26.060 there weren't like a lot of offers out on the table, having not really run a lot of longer

01:25:30.520 distance races. So take me back to this race in Houston. Cause I don't, I don't think, I think

01:25:34.740 I missed somewhere in there that that was actually your first half marathon, because obviously the

01:25:39.360 result of that race is so out of this world that it's easy to miss that little detail. So it's,

01:25:44.740 it's the beginning of 2007 year and a half before the Olympics, you're sort of trying to figure out

01:25:50.580 where you, where you belong in this running world. You show up to Houston. It's, and at the time,

01:25:56.940 the American record for a half marathon is an hour and 55 seconds. So tell me what you're thinking at

01:26:04.460 the start line. What are your expectations? What are you there to prove to yourself?

01:26:08.180 So I had written down on my hands, this was like before the days of GPS watch, it isn't overly

01:26:13.280 cumbersome, you know, like the big old brick ones, but not like little nice ones. So I was just using

01:26:18.000 a Timex watch. Right. And so I had written down on my hand, like three different categories of times

01:26:24.000 that I was going for. So like one, if I was having an A day and I was like just under American record

01:26:28.280 pace. One, if I was having a B day, which was like 61, 30 or something. And one for like a C day,

01:26:34.520 like 62 flat. Right. And like I said, training was just going phenomenal. Like where I was blowing

01:26:39.500 my own mind, but more like it's the feeling, like that's what I love the most about athletics and

01:26:46.800 about running and about that day. I described Houston as being like heaven and hell at the same

01:26:52.200 time. It was heaven because like I was floating the whole time. It felt easy the entire way. It was

01:26:59.220 insane. Like the coolest sensation, one of the coolest bodily sensations I've ever experienced in my

01:27:05.320 life. And if I could go to heaven and experience that feeling of running like that every single day,

01:27:09.840 I would like, it was unreal. But the reason why it was also hell and it kind of haunted me

01:27:15.240 is especially all throughout my running careers, I can never get back there. So it was my best

01:27:20.040 half marathon by far. I never broke 61 again and I can never figure out how to go get back to that place.

01:27:27.560 You went 59?

01:27:30.000 59, 43.

01:27:31.180 43. So you, you obliterate the American record. Like that's over a minute off the American record.

01:27:38.080 Right. And so I was running, going back to the story of the race, like the first mile,

01:27:42.400 I was just going out and you know, now we have so much science and technology and heart rate we can

01:27:46.900 go off of. And, uh, we're looking at our watch a million times, but again, I'm just looking at like

01:27:51.300 my normal Timex watch. And so I am, what's happening in my mind in that first mile is I'm literally

01:27:57.380 like going into my mind's eye, picturing myself back on green church road and mammoth where we

01:28:02.100 trained and being like, if I was running a 13 mile threshold, could I maintain this effort that I'm

01:28:07.340 currently at? And the answer was yes. So I was just rolling with it. Right. Came through the first

01:28:12.340 miles, like five 35. I was like, that felt too easy. Like I wasn't supposed to be running this fast,

01:28:18.040 but that just felt too easy. So let me just like notch it down a little bit more. And an effort that I

01:28:23.160 know, again, going back in my mind's eye, I know I can hold this effort to the finish and next mile

01:28:27.780 was like five, four 32. And then the next mile was like four 28. And I was just like starting to scare

01:28:34.140 myself a little bit. I was like, okay, like, let's not screw this thing up. Like, obviously you're

01:28:39.080 going to have a heck of a day today. No one else is around like Meb's in the race and all those guys,

01:28:43.360 like from the very first miles, just me and the roads. Right. But it didn't even matter. Like I was so

01:28:48.820 mentally clicked in and like, everything was just firing is just like all how it's supposed to be.

01:28:54.920 Right. Like the most magical sensation like I've ever had. And so I just kept pushing and just,

01:29:01.720 again, like it's waiting for it to get hard almost. And it never, never did. Like I had one issue out

01:29:07.240 there around mile nine where my stomach got a little bit turny because over half marathon,

01:29:11.900 we're not taking in any fluids if the weather's right, the cool conditions. And it was a nice,

01:29:16.020 cool, perfect day to run in Houston that day, flat course. And so I wasn't taking in anything

01:29:20.620 around mile nine, my stomach got a little bit upset. And you know, that passed a couple minutes

01:29:25.060 later, but literally like it was, it was easy the entire way. Like I I'm still super curious,

01:29:33.020 you know, if I had pacemakers and if that was a full marathon, what I could have run that day. Cause

01:29:37.660 I got myself back in really good shape, but never that kind of shape over half marathon again.

01:29:43.080 And looking back on it, that's why like, I'm such a big proponent of speed now. Right. It's like I

01:29:48.020 had spent not just the last year focused on 5k development. I had spent my entire running career

01:29:53.440 from the time I was 13 for 10 years until I was 23 working on speed, working on five. And then all

01:29:59.460 of a sudden I piled on marathon training where I'm hitting longer thresholds, higher volume than I've

01:30:04.340 ever done before. And bang, there it is. And so that's why that 5k speed, like I can't emphasize

01:30:09.860 it enough with my athletes. I'm coaching now, the further away I got from that 5k fitness,

01:30:14.740 the harder the half felt, the harder the marathon felt. But, uh, that day in Houston,

01:30:19.760 it was just, it's like a warm knife through butter all day long.

01:30:23.860 When you crossed that finish line, did you feel like I actually could have gone a little bit harder?

01:30:30.160 Yeah, that's interesting. Right. Cause I'm talking about how easy it felt yet. Like I wasn't like

01:30:35.000 leaving anything in the tank necessarily, you know? So I felt like I was running as hard as I

01:30:40.400 ran practice. But I mean, if you watch, go back and watch like YouTube video, I mean, like I didn't.

01:30:45.080 And that's why like when people do like Kipchoge breaking too, like he didn't look crazy tired

01:30:49.200 after that. Right. But there's also, you get this huge hit of adrenaline when you come across the

01:30:54.220 line, do something like that. Like breaking 60 was kind of a lifetime goal for me. And then to go and

01:30:59.480 do it my first marathon and like, Peter, it was crazy too. Like, so my parents were on the lead

01:31:05.160 vehicle. My wife was on the lead vehicle, my agent, my coach, they're all on the lead vehicle.

01:31:09.720 So I'm literally staring at them the entire race and they're not allowed to cheer or anything, but

01:31:14.920 you know, like any athletic performance that I've done, like I was just a piece of the puzzle,

01:31:21.600 right? Like it wasn't all me, like my mom, like she provided the safe place for me, my refuge.

01:31:27.580 Every time I would come back, all rattled because I had a bad workout, I got hurt or whatever. Like

01:31:33.020 she was like, she provided that home that provide that refuge. My dad was my coach. My wife was there

01:31:38.420 for me through the depression at Stanford and all the times, all the good, all the bad, you know?

01:31:43.340 And so staring at the people who are your team, the entire race was like hugely emotionally empowering

01:31:49.680 for me as well, you know? So I'll never forget. I was actually, they, they get to the finish line,

01:31:54.840 the lead car. They kind of zip up the road a little bit. They drop my parents and Sarah,

01:32:00.540 my wife, like 200 meters before the finish line. And they have to like, they're like running back

01:32:06.340 to try to get to the finish before I get there. So I'm coming down the finishing stretch and I see

01:32:11.140 my mom just like booking, like trying to make it to the finish line before I get there. And I actually

01:32:16.960 passed her. She didn't make it. So like, if you look closely in some, they might've blurred her out

01:32:21.520 in some of the pictures, but like, she's in the back, like sprinting behind me. Uh, but yeah,

01:32:26.020 I'll never forget, like coming across the finish line, giving my parents a big hug, giving my wife,

01:32:30.460 big hug, my coach. And it was kind of this, the sensation of like, we did this, you know, like

01:32:35.060 it wasn't so special. Cause I felt like I had done anything incredible, but it was like,

01:32:39.980 we all did this thing together. And it was just, just an amazing lifetime, you know, moment that I'll

01:32:46.820 never forget. Now, from a professional standpoint, how much did your life change in that moment?

01:32:50.980 Because that really puts you on the map as America's great hope for the marathon in 2008,

01:32:57.020 right? Yeah. I mean, it was, it was huge. I went from a guy who was decent on the track,

01:33:02.400 NCAA champs. I had a little bit of credentials behind me, but I went from that to that put me

01:33:07.680 inside of the top 10 all time performers over half marathon. So it was kind of like all of a sudden

01:33:12.960 this moment of realization of like, Oh dang, like I have a chance at this, like I have a chance at

01:33:17.820 meddling in Beijing. Like I, and there was also just the excitement of like, I found it. Like

01:33:22.800 I felt like I'd been hitting my head against a wall for so long with the shorter distance stuff

01:33:27.580 just wasn't quite clicking, right? Like it just wasn't quite me. And that day in Houston is like,

01:33:34.640 this is what I was created to do. Right. And I think it's, we all have this kind of experience

01:33:39.180 experience in life where we're kind of searching out, like, what am I here for? Like, why was I

01:33:44.820 created? What is my giftedness? When you find that area where like, this is why I'm here. This is what

01:33:51.120 I was made to do. It's kind of that moment of like, Whoa, like this is, this is it. This is my thing,

01:33:57.540 you know? And it did like create a little bit more of heighten my own expectations. You know,

01:34:02.340 like after that, I never showed up in another race thinking I couldn't win or not having high

01:34:08.540 expectations for the race. So that was maybe a little bit of a harder thing for me to manage,

01:34:14.140 but it was just more than anything, just a cool moment of like realizing like now I'm, I'm in the

01:34:19.440 club, you know, with, with the best guys in the world. I think you've said it really well, right?

01:34:23.300 Which is this was heaven, this was hell. And I, the hell part of that is something that I've,

01:34:27.480 I've always observed great athletes with just a tincture of sadness too, because the stage on

01:34:34.120 which you compete is the most brutal stage because it's the one for which you have the shortest

01:34:38.880 half-life. So when you say like, this is what I was meant to do on the one hand, most of us can

01:34:45.520 not even relate to what you're talking about, right? Like I can't relate to being the best in

01:34:50.160 the world at anything, anything. I couldn't relate to being the thousandth best person in the world at

01:34:55.160 anything, anything, right? Physical, not physical, doesn't matter. But now when you take that thing

01:35:00.300 that is your gift and you acknowledge that, well, actually it's something that is very fleeting.

01:35:07.740 There's a very narrow window in your life in which you get to be really good at this.

01:35:12.440 And by the way, as a runner, technically it's a day, like you're going to have a single best run

01:35:18.040 and you don't necessarily know when it's going to be. You might be very good for a decade, but there's

01:35:22.860 really going to be a time when you look back and say, that was the best I could ever do.

01:35:27.120 Obviously for the half marathon, we know when that day was. Four years later, it would be your

01:35:31.620 best marathon of all time. But I think for some people, I would imagine at least that makes being

01:35:38.700 a retired athlete or an athlete who's passed his or her prime, a very difficult process. Do you talk

01:35:45.940 with your athletes about that? Even though they're on the upswing, right? They're in the part of the,

01:35:51.240 hey, I want to get better. I want to get better. But do you spend any time with them talking about,

01:35:56.220 hey, this, first of all, enjoy this like crazy because it's going to be gone and it's going to

01:36:01.340 be gone probably by the time you're 30 and you have the rest of your life to not be the best at this

01:36:07.640 thing. And secondly, here's how you can prepare for that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I talk a lot

01:36:13.000 with my wife about that because she's 38 turning 39 in April and she's actually running the best stuff

01:36:18.660 she's ever run still, which is incredible. And I think speaks to like why women age better than

01:36:23.560 men in a lot of ways. But what was really impactful for me at the end of my career was this moment I

01:36:29.700 was in an airplane. I was looking out over everything and just trying to get clarity about

01:36:33.960 what was going on because I'd just been through four years of massive struggle, right? And what I

01:36:38.360 felt like was just kind of like having a little prayer session with God. And what I felt like was

01:36:42.520 sensing is just this room reminder that it's not meant to last forever. Because I think like you're

01:36:48.880 saying, Peter, it's like when you're in it, you feel like it is going to last forever and it is

01:36:53.380 supposed to last forever. But that's actually the like what makes life so beautiful, right? Is that

01:36:59.260 like nothing lasts forever, right? It's like what makes the sunset so beautiful. It doesn't just stay

01:37:04.660 in the sky forever. It's what makes life so special because it's not just going to go on forever.

01:37:09.500 So having that moment of realization that this it's okay for it to not last forever. It's okay

01:37:15.760 that like that was my day. And I did I savored it for everything is worth right. And that's

01:37:21.580 absolutely what I tell my athletes as well, like, savor every second of it. But life is going to

01:37:27.880 change, you're going to enter into new seasons. And life is beautiful every single day, all around

01:37:33.580 you, right? So like having this perspective of like, yes, this is very important is what we're going

01:37:37.620 after. But like true beauty is around us all the time, if we have the eyes to see it and the ears

01:37:44.120 to hear it. And so like, removing ourselves from performance, some ways can be super, super helpful,

01:37:49.740 not only as we transition out of sport, but even when we're in sport, just being like, this is

01:37:54.200 something that is adding to my life, it is not my life. And like, I can have this day in Houston,

01:37:59.300 have this very beautiful experience, this very magical day. But I can actually just go for a walk

01:38:04.640 outside my house, and look at the trees and look at the sun and the stars and be outside in the moon

01:38:09.580 and get the same kind of like gratitude for life, just by simply entering into nature and being fully

01:38:16.300 present in it, you know, so I've definitely like my perspective has changed as for a long time, just

01:38:21.940 all wrapped into this performance, performance, performance, performance. It's easy to be that way.

01:38:27.660 And I do enjoy going after performances. I love like seeing growth, seeing change in the body,

01:38:32.460 seeing adaptation, going after big goals. Like I love that's still very much who I am.

01:38:37.460 And I think that's something that helps people transition out of this sport. A lot of people

01:38:42.380 talk about having a sense of identity loss when they stop doing whatever their sport is.

01:38:46.580 But for me, like I had to figure out how do I stay true to who I am? Because running was just an

01:38:51.380 expression of who I was. And it was like my painting, right? But now like I have to find another

01:38:57.880 mechanism to express who I am. So I'm doing that like in the lifting space and these crazy

01:39:02.340 challenges that I'm doing, I'm still like finding a way to express myself. And I think that's what

01:39:07.280 as humans, like we want to have that experience, right? Like we're here for a reason and we want

01:39:11.980 to express ourself on our canvas, whatever it might be. And when you lose that ability to be

01:39:18.720 able to express yourself, that's when things can get dark pretty quick, right? So like for people,

01:39:23.840 for my athletes who are transitioning out of the sports being like, okay, like how do you stay true

01:39:27.860 to who you are? Like I love physical challenge. I love seeing growth. And so I'm going to express

01:39:32.900 it now through lifting and that's going to come to an end at some point. And then I'm gonna find

01:39:36.700 another way to express it. But I think as long as we're continually finding ways to be ourself and

01:39:42.140 to express ourself, we're going to be happy individuals. In some ways, your experience post

01:39:47.540 this amazing breakthrough in the half marathon is kind of paralleled in a way with what happened in

01:39:53.760 2011, right? So in, you go into Beijing in 08, in some ways with the expectation of the running

01:39:59.720 world on your shoulders, like you're going to medal in the marathon, your trajectory has been

01:40:03.900 unbelievable. We talked about that race, 10th place finish, still very impressive, especially the way

01:40:09.940 in which you did it, where you went out a little tentative and then had to kind of, you know, try to

01:40:14.600 reel people back and go from 60th to 10th. Now let's fast forward. It's 2011. How were you feeling

01:40:21.500 going into the Boston marathon that year? Was there, what was it about your training that led

01:40:26.500 you into that race? So poised to do so well. Yeah. So I had a big transition. So I was trained

01:40:32.740 up in Mammoth and then 2010 left the Mammoth track club. And again, like a big part was like,

01:40:38.520 my faith was inspiring that decision. Like I've always just been a super spiritual person and have

01:40:43.580 a ton of respect from people that have every faith tradition and background, you know, but for my own

01:40:48.500 journey, like I just love that part of life, that spiritual dimension, you know, and I was just

01:40:53.220 really desperate to experience God in some way. Right. So decided to leave the Mammoth track club

01:40:59.560 and essentially like have God as my coach. But really that just looked like, like me spending a

01:41:03.720 lot of time in prayer, trying to connect with God. And again, that's where I got this kind of like

01:41:07.940 revelation. It's not about what I do. It's about how I do what I do. Like that came from that season.

01:41:13.340 And so I kind of went through the season and then I was kind of experimenting with some new styles of

01:41:17.900 training that I'd never done before. And again, like new stimulus always is helpful for the body.

01:41:23.480 So I'd been kind of in the same routine, the same, doing the same structure training.

01:41:27.700 Tell me a little bit about that, because one of the things my wife actually insisted on today,

01:41:31.780 and I'm not doing a good job of it, though. I promise I will, is she, my wife's a runner and she

01:41:36.240 really wants to know every detail about your training. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about it

01:41:41.840 here in the pre transition. So IE in the 2010 mammoth days, what's your volume? How did you

01:41:48.540 warm up? How much body work were you doing? What kind of stretching, all of that sort of stuff? Like

01:41:52.600 what were the tempo runs like? And then I'm curious to hear what that looked like when you basically

01:41:57.140 became self-coached post that departure. Yeah. So it's pretty simple, you know, it's like

01:42:01.960 just to lay out like a quick sample week, like every Tuesday I'm doing interval sessions where you're

01:42:07.280 working on that kind of like 5k specific kind of speed, things like six by mile, 10 by K,

01:42:13.680 800 meter repeats, 400 meter repeats. I've kind of since like gravitated more towards shorter

01:42:18.280 distance repeats, 400s, 200s, things like that. I think that's way more important for marathoners

01:42:23.860 because you kind of want a lot of differential between how fast those Tuesday intervals are

01:42:28.860 compared to your like Thursday or Friday threshold.

01:42:31.480 So prior to your departure, when they were one mile repeats and 1k repeats, let's say the main

01:42:37.800 set was 10 by a kilometer or six by a mile. That's the main set. What's the warmup when you

01:42:43.340 arrive at the track, what's the first thing you do? So we do like 20 minute easy jog and then we'd

01:42:49.460 come back, do some like dynamic flexibility or maybe some static stuff, but not a lot of static

01:42:54.140 stretching going on. Stretching has not been a huge part of like my, my running at all. You actually

01:42:59.800 want some tension in your legs. Think about it. Like your muscles being springs. Like if there's

01:43:04.440 some tension, a tightly wound spring is going to respond to the ground quicker, right? Compared to

01:43:08.960 like a slinky that's super slow. So you actually want a certain amount of tension, healthy tension.

01:43:13.400 You want full range of motion, but so we're doing a lot. So like mobility work to get that full range,

01:43:17.940 but keeping some tension in the legs. So not a lot of static stuff.

01:43:21.140 And that 20 minute jog for you is what pace that's like eight minute mile. I mean, how slow?

01:43:26.140 Yeah. Yep. Kind of like that eight minute mile pace kind of range.

01:43:29.380 Kind of just like let your body do what it wants to do, but no effort, right? You're not breathing

01:43:33.260 hard. You're conversational the whole time. Get back. You do that dynamic flexibility and stuff,

01:43:38.100 go into some drills and strides. And I have videos of all this on my YouTube channel,

01:43:42.260 run free training, YouTube channel. People are curious to check it out, but drills and strides

01:43:46.800 before maybe like, it takes like five, 10 minutes to do that. The strides are maybe like six times a

01:43:53.160 hundred meters, something like that. And then change shoes into your racing shoes and then straight

01:43:58.000 into the workout. And then you would do, let's say it's a six by a mile. How fast would you run

01:44:03.040 that mile? So if you're, your half marathon pace would be a four 32 ish, your marathon pace would

01:44:09.840 be a four 42 to four 45. How much faster do you need to run that mile? So yeah, if we're doing it up

01:44:15.840 at altitude, I would typically be running right around that kind of four 30 pace at 7,000 feet. So if

01:44:22.460 you're down at sea level, that's kind of equivalent to like four 20 ish, maybe a tad bit under. So at

01:44:28.000 the six by a mile and the, the K's that's more of like 10 K specific workout. But again,

01:44:33.700 I'd kind of gravitate more towards like five K specific stuff a little bit quicker.

01:44:38.260 And how much rest in between each set with the miles, we'd keep it fairly tight, like 90 seconds

01:44:44.240 to two minutes. Again, kind of depends when you're at altitude, you take a little bit more rest,

01:44:48.540 but it's crazy. Like, you know, as you get fit, like you recover super fast and the intensity,

01:44:53.640 you know, it's like, we're not doing like max sprints where those guys got to take like 10

01:44:57.400 minutes between sprints. Right? Like we're very much like when you're doing that 10 K range,

01:45:02.020 ideally you're running an effort, you should be able to hold for 10 K and you're stopping it a

01:45:05.940 mile. So you're not like killing it. So anywhere between 90 seconds and two minutes on the rest.

01:45:10.940 And are you walking during the 90 second recovery or standing still?

01:45:14.800 Sometimes we're like walk jogging, just like slow walk, jog kind of depends. Like I like doing

01:45:19.500 in and out kind of intervals too. And I was like one of pre Fontaine's workouts where you do like

01:45:23.560 200 meters fast, 200 meters kind of moderate. So the moderate part would be at like eight minute

01:45:29.160 pace or even faster, like, like seven minute pace. And then the fast part is like goal five K pace

01:45:35.340 or slightly slower than mile pace even. So there's a lot of different ways, variations that we take on

01:45:40.620 those workouts. And what would be the cool down at the end of that main set?

01:45:44.800 And then a 20 minute cool down. And then the whole day, you know, we're just resting,

01:45:50.360 doing some mobility work, eating ice bathing, which, you know, it's funny, like the, the science

01:45:55.680 on the ice bath has changed quite a bit. Like we would go from these workouts in long run straight

01:46:00.200 to the Creek straight into cold water. Whereas, you know, the science is now showing you want your

01:46:04.780 body to respond to the inflammation first. So that's more of what we do now where we wouldn't

01:46:09.400 do an ice bath. We don't do a ton of ice baths in general, but there's a whole bunch of

01:46:13.980 other good positive effects of ice bathing, like dopamine going up tenfold and all this stuff.

01:46:18.900 Right, right. It's going to have some antidepressant effects. And would you be

01:46:22.420 doing two workouts on that day or one?

01:46:24.960 So then we'll come back in the afternoon, just like a 30, 35 minute easy run, and then go straight

01:46:30.380 to the weight room and then do our leg lifting. So that's, that's a mistake. I see a lot of runners

01:46:34.800 make is you want all your leg stressors to be on the same day. And it's not what you feel like

01:46:39.840 doing. Like you don't feel like doing weights after doing a hard run, but you do the hard run

01:46:43.660 first. And then ideally you come back in the afternoon, you could do it right after the hard

01:46:47.840 run, but you probably won't get quite as much out of it. Cause you're bringing fatigue into the

01:46:51.520 lifting. If you space it out a little bit more, you usually feel better during the lifting.

01:46:55.640 So yeah, we do our hard leg session in the afternoon and then head home, eat early to bed.

01:47:00.880 I always described my life was more of a professional sleeper than a professional running. Like,

01:47:05.600 honestly, I was just sleeping all the time. I would book out every single day from one to 3 PM

01:47:11.180 would be my business meeting. And so no calls, nothing scheduled during that time. And those

01:47:16.540 were just two hour naps every single day. So what were you sleeping like 10 hours a day

01:47:20.980 between the nap and night? Yeah. Yeah. Probably right around there. I'm like, I'm probably in bed

01:47:25.380 for nine to 10 hours every night, but there'd also be some restlessness from the hard training and,

01:47:30.660 and honestly, maybe even from sleeping too much, you know, I wasn't very sleep deprived. So

01:47:35.460 sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night, be starving, go get some, a snack,

01:47:40.560 get back in bed, lay there and awake for an hour or two and then fall back asleep. But

01:47:44.700 just you want, it's like, like the Kenyans, the Ethiopians, they spend a ton of time off their feet

01:47:49.600 as well. Right. So it's like when you're not training, you're trying to not be doing anything.

01:47:54.940 So we're like runners pro runners are very lazy people, like from day to day, like we don't go for

01:48:01.120 walks or hikes or do anything. It's just train, eat, sleep, stay off your feet. And you're always

01:48:07.640 aware of that energy expenditure. You're trying to save as much as you can for your training.

01:48:12.120 I remember in high school, I grew up in Canada. And so we had a lot of really amazing Jamaican

01:48:16.920 runners. Uh, of course they were sprinters and they used to just tease each other so much because

01:48:22.500 they'd be like, they'd be like, look, we are the laziest people you will ever meet. And if you want

01:48:27.920 to make us run faster, just put a couch at the finish line. Like whoever can get to the finish

01:48:32.900 line first gets to lay on that couch, but it was really work hard, play hard, right? It was really

01:48:38.200 super intense workouts. These guys would do. And then as much, nothing as possible to really

01:48:44.320 conserve energy. Now, as you probably know, cyclists have to work very hard deliberately to calorie

01:48:51.180 restrict. And often they show up to major tour events, right? So not the one day classic stuff,

01:48:57.300 but when you're thinking about the Tour de France, the Giro, the Vuelta, these sort of

01:49:00.360 huge stage races, they're very depleted. They're trying to be as light as possible. Everything

01:49:05.720 comes down to this one single metric that I think running doesn't quite have, but in cycling,

01:49:10.520 you have this thing called Watts per kilo. Everything is Watts per kilo. If you lined up all

01:49:16.040 the cyclists at the beginning of the Tour de France, and you could know what everybody's

01:49:20.840 threshold was in Watts per kilo, that would predict the order they would finish barring a strategic

01:49:25.980 mishap or an injury or an accident. How deliberately were you watching your weight

01:49:32.640 during this period of time? Or were you basically just saying, I could eat as much as I wanted and

01:49:38.040 my weight would basically float to a level that I was happy with?

01:49:42.040 Yeah, no, I mean, I was very specific with it and preface all this with just saying like,

01:49:46.660 it's not the most healthy lifestyle. Doing what I was doing, training at the level I was doing

01:49:51.000 wasn't optimal for my health. Like my testosterone was clinically low every single time I tested it.

01:49:56.560 How low?

01:49:57.600 In the hundreds, like 150, something like that.

01:50:00.160 Oh, so you had the testosterone of a woman.

01:50:02.300 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is really interesting. Like how do you run so fast with such low

01:50:06.840 testosterone? I don't understand that.

01:50:09.080 When I finished residency, my testosterone was in the 220s. So it was probably in the low 200s

01:50:14.640 throughout all of residency and not because of training, just because of sleep deprivation and

01:50:18.600 a whole bunch of other factors. But wow, 100s is staggeringly low.

01:50:25.040 Yeah, and it would kind of come back up when I take these two-week breaks, right? So going back

01:50:29.540 to the weight thing, I would take, I would get down to, ideally I raced my best at 137. I got,

01:50:35.600 I'm 5'10". I got down as low as 127, but I wasn't, if I was less than 137, I was getting worse,

01:50:44.300 which is really interesting because I was on Lance's podcast and we were chatting about this.

01:50:48.260 And he said he didn't ever feel like he could get too light, whereas I was much the opposite. If I

01:50:53.340 was under 137, it was not good for me at all. Well, Lance was a really big cyclist for his type

01:51:00.340 of racing. I mean, Lance's race weight was like 160 to 165, which for a guy who's five foot nine,

01:51:08.480 five foot 10, that's quite a lot of weight for a guy who was such a good climber. And I think today

01:51:14.940 we see guys being quite a bit lighter in that group, like I think a GC contender today is God

01:51:22.360 probably like 140 pounds. Five nine, 140 would be a great cyclist build. So if you're optimal, which

01:51:30.200 by the way, 137, that still strikes me as crazy light. But if you're 137, were you managing up to

01:51:36.380 that weight or down to that weight? Down to that weight. So yeah, I take these two-week breaks where

01:51:41.480 I wouldn't run at all. And literally, it was like donut eating competition for two weeks straight.

01:51:46.100 So I would, I'd literally put on like over 10 pounds in that two-week period. And I hated myself

01:51:52.720 for doing that. Like it wasn't good for me emotionally or mentally, but it worked every

01:51:58.260 single time for my buildup. So again, I'm not saying like athletes should do this, right? But my problem

01:52:03.820 was I was getting so lean and so light. I should have taken a more healthy approach to putting on weight,

01:52:09.580 to being good to my body, shifting my macros around during that time off and do it in a healthy

01:52:14.500 way, not with a bunch of crap like I was doing. But I'd put on those 10 pounds, 12 pounds, get up to

01:52:20.560 like 150 ish. And then it'd be like a six month gradual reduction in body weight to where I'd get

01:52:27.640 to that 137, just like a couple of weeks before my competition. And then I was, I was good to go.

01:52:33.540 But also too, like, I think it's highly specific for athletes. So like I said, I'm in the middle of

01:52:38.660 five kids, my brothers who aren't athletic, like walk around at like 165 to 170. So that's probably

01:52:45.900 where my natural body weight should be somewhere right in that range. And so I was trying to get

01:52:51.540 down to weights that were pretty far from my normal, right? So, and that's why it was like pretty

01:52:56.600 unhealthy for me to be and why I couldn't stay down in those 137s, 140s for very long. Cause I would

01:53:02.980 get super, super run down. My motivation would go down. My training would go to crap. So again,

01:53:08.620 if someone is more naturally made to be a marathon or smaller frame sits already, like their normal

01:53:14.640 body weight would be like my wife, Sarah, like she sits around like 110 ish year round, but even if

01:53:20.740 she wasn't running, she'd probably be about the same weight. So she can sit at that weight year round.

01:53:24.720 No problem. Whereas for me, like it's not healthy for me to be down at 137. So I have to come back

01:53:30.300 out of it. So that's where it's really important for people to just know their body and where it

01:53:34.080 should naturally be. And then realizing, okay, if you're going to manipulate it down to a range

01:53:38.240 where you're the fastest and the lightest at, you got to come back out of that as well.

01:53:42.780 Yeah. My wife's the same way. Sure. Her walk around weight is 110, 111, and she has to work to

01:53:48.240 maintain that weight as opposed to do anything else. And I think that's probably why she's just a good

01:53:53.840 runner is it's just, she's naturally so light that it comes to her easily in that regard.

01:53:58.980 So tell me what volume, what was your weekly mileage when you were still training with

01:54:04.240 Mammoth? So it was probably, you know, again, this was like pre Garmin days is probably around

01:54:09.540 like 110 or so. I thought it was more than that, but then we got Garmin's and started measuring a

01:54:15.620 lot of the loops we were doing for our easy running. We're like, Oh, these aren't nearly,

01:54:19.100 they're like a mile shorter than we thought. So it's probably a little bit less than I thought,

01:54:22.720 but those easy days are just chill. And then I think this is the other mistake that a lot of

01:54:26.960 runners make is they're just kind of running the same all the time. And that will get you to a

01:54:31.420 certain level, right? Like there's a place for that. But if you really want to see how good you

01:54:35.760 can get, you got to like have your hard day, super hard and your easy day, super chill.

01:54:40.020 So like oftentimes, like, you know, like I said, I'm running 12 miles under five minute pace.

01:54:45.000 And then the next day I'm coming back and running like eight 30 pace for an easy run, just super,

01:54:50.300 super chill and slow. So having that kind of variance between pacing, I think is super important. I mean,

01:54:55.920 it's, it's not really rocket science, right? It's like you stress the body, you rest the body,

01:54:59.600 it adapts, and then you keep repeating the cycle over and over again.

01:55:02.820 It's not rocket science, but if there's one thing that I spend a lot of time talking about

01:55:07.340 with my patients, when it comes to this particular aspect of training, it's, and again, this isn't to

01:55:12.160 train them for, to become competitive athletes, but it's important from a physiologic standpoint,

01:55:17.200 as we think about longevity, it's most people are training in this garbage zone where it's too high

01:55:25.680 in intensity to build a true aerobic foundation and too low in intensity to truly stress the body

01:55:33.480 glycolytically. So, you know, we talk about it in zones, right? So there, we think zone two is how

01:55:39.580 we describe it. And this is, we just, we define it by lactate metabolism. So zone two is that all day

01:55:45.160 pace. Lactate has to be below two millimolar. This is a pace you should be able to hold all day

01:55:50.820 from a metabolic standpoint. You probably can't hold it all day from a muscular and structural

01:55:56.220 standpoint, but metabolically you should be able to hold this pace all day. And that's easier than

01:56:01.660 people are used to training. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there's like,

01:56:06.060 got to be this real push pace, kind of your four by four pace, right? Four on, all out, four off.

01:56:11.720 And most people aren't used to that level of discomfort. So they're kind of in this no man's

01:56:17.120 land. So they're suffering two problems. One, they're in a physiologic no man's land and two,

01:56:22.140 there's no variability to it anyway. So even though you say it's obvious, I think it's important for

01:56:27.920 people to hear this discussion because I don't, I don't think enough people understand both for

01:56:31.960 performance and also longevity, why you have to be at the more extremes of kind of zone two,

01:56:37.620 zone five is where the progress comes. One kind of like easy way to help manipulate this system a

01:56:43.680 little bit is if you're a coffee drinker, you talked a little bit about caffeine, but like,

01:56:48.000 we'd only have caffeine before our hard days. And then, so the easy day, like you feel like death,

01:56:53.260 like you're tired from the workout, but also because you don't have caffeine on board and you,

01:56:57.720 you're just kind of forced to take it really slow. Like you don't feel like you could run fast if

01:57:01.200 your life depended on it. So if you're trying to like a lot of the clients we're working with

01:57:06.480 run free, it's like not reasonable for them to not have any caffeine on the day, but we're like,

01:57:11.140 let's at least manipulate it. So you're having it more. So before the hard workouts and then a lot

01:57:15.440 less on the easy days. And there are some athletes I'm sure you've seen that don't really get a benefit

01:57:20.220 from caffeine. Like I never got a benefit from caffeine. And to this day, like I can drink coffee

01:57:26.460 at any time of day has no bearing on my sleep. So I get no up from it. I get no down from it. I

01:57:32.580 just, I could drink three coffees a day for a month and then stop experience, no headaches,

01:57:38.840 no withdrawal, not even notice it. That's interesting. And there are different genes that

01:57:43.740 are responsible for caffeine metabolism. So, so people do sort of vary in that, but I've always been

01:57:48.360 incredibly envious of the people who are very sensitive to caffeine because it's an awesome tool to

01:57:54.680 have in your toolkit for just this purpose, but also just for wakefulness and overcoming jet lag

01:58:00.320 and travel and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. When used correctly, it can be super helpful. Of course,

01:58:05.200 like when abused and if you're sensitive to it and you're drinking it later in the day and it screws

01:58:09.100 up your sleep, then it stops being helpful. But yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's like, like I was

01:58:13.900 saying, everyone's an experiment of one, right? So that's why you got to just play with stuff till you

01:58:17.920 find what works for you. So once you became self-coached, how did the workouts change? What did you do

01:58:23.240 leading up to 2011 Boston in terms of volume, intensity and everything else? One of the big

01:58:28.640 adjustments I made, I started spacing things out. So I don't think I finished the week. So we had the

01:58:33.100 intervals on Tuesday, you know, and then like a long threshold on Friday. So you get two easy days

01:58:38.120 before that. So you're feeling a little bit better for that threshold. And tell me about the threshold.

01:58:41.940 The threshold is a constant. It's like a simulated slightly higher than race pace, shorter distance.

01:58:47.800 Yeah. And it gets more towards race pace as it gets longer. So we grow those out. You're starting

01:58:54.020 out. It may be like five or six miles. And then you get to where you're doing 15 miles straight

01:58:58.920 without stopping. And I do three of those every single 12 week buildup for a marathon, which that

01:59:04.480 would be a very typical buildup for marathon about 12 weeks and make sure I get three of those long

01:59:09.260 thresholds in. And those were my biggest indicator workouts. It's kind of like whatever I knew I could

01:59:13.920 hold for 15 miles in training in the context of hard training. Right. So it's not like you don't

01:59:19.800 fully taper for this workout and just bang the heck out of it and be like, Oh, I can run this for a

01:59:23.880 marathon. It's like, no, your legs like need to be a little bit of fatigue. You need to be in the

01:59:27.680 middle of hard training. But then generally speaking, whatever you can run for that 15 mile

01:59:31.500 threshold, you can hold for a marathon, which is also kind of like mind blowing and hard for

01:59:35.860 first time marathoners to believe that. Cause you're like, how do I go 11 more miles at this pace?

01:59:40.480 But that's the magic of tapering the energy out on the course, the carb loading, all that stuff.

01:59:46.020 Your body finds a way to be able to hold that through. So that 15 mile threshold or that

01:59:50.740 threshold of varying distances on Friday and then Sunday coming back with a long run. So again,

01:59:55.240 you're doing that long run with a little bit of fatigue in your, in your legs. That'd be anywhere

01:59:59.420 from an hour 45 to two and a half hours. But during that time work, and we would go off time,

02:00:06.240 not distance, but we're covering, I, sometimes I'd be running over the marathon distance for

02:00:11.440 two and a half hours. Right. So those are, those are high quality efforts. Oftentimes it's kind of

02:00:16.600 like medium pace. So say maybe six minute pace for the first half of that. And then the second half

02:00:22.160 of that, we're doing like fartlek style running where you're practicing changing gears on tired legs

02:00:26.700 and just hitting that aerobic end a little bit harder towards the end of it. But a lot of it is just

02:00:31.720 like mentally learning, like, how do I turn my legs on when I feel really dead, when I'm 25 miles into

02:00:38.240 this race, how do I, what cues can I go to, to turn things on and, and to change gears here?

02:00:44.580 Cause it's, it doesn't matter if you're running six minute pace or eight minute pace, when you get

02:00:48.760 20 miles into your run, you feel tired. Right. And so you got to just learn like, okay, what mental

02:00:54.260 cues can I pull on here to turn everything on? But everything you just described was how you were

02:00:58.960 doing it before 2011. Yep. And then how did you tweak that formula?

02:01:04.500 So I started spacing things out a little bit more. I started just taking two easy days between every

02:01:09.100 session. So I was focusing on like a nine, 10 day cycle, but then I was making those workouts higher

02:01:15.160 quality, bigger. So like one workout that I implemented instead of saying like those Tuesday

02:01:20.980 short sessions, which just might've been a little bit, again, I think I got too far away from 5k

02:01:26.900 fitness. I should have spent more time developing that, but, but this workout, I absolutely love

02:01:32.040 for marathoning where I do 20 by a thousand meters with a 200 meter easy jog between each

02:01:38.960 thousand meter. And that was done faster than marathon pace. So the goal is to like drive your

02:01:44.340 threshold down. So you spend all this time doing threshold running at a certain pace, and then you're

02:01:48.900 going just a tad bit quicker than that for these broken up thresholds.

02:01:52.600 So how much quicker? So if your marathon target pace for a K is what is two, just under three

02:02:00.200 minutes or just over three minutes? Three minutes is a 206 and change 206 30 marathon. So yeah. So

02:02:07.140 like maybe I'll be shooting for like 255, like five seconds per K quicker kind of feel. Yeah.

02:02:12.940 How many days, let's just assume we're talking about it as a week, even though it's a nine day cycle,

02:02:18.280 how many weeks would you succeed on that day where you would actually go to 55 or better for each of

02:02:26.140 the 20 K versus fail somewhere along the way? Actually, I think I was pretty successful most

02:02:33.460 days. Right. But I think a lot of that is because I wasn't trying to bite off more than I can chew.

02:02:37.500 Right. Like I wasn't trying to hit home runs and workouts. Like they were workouts where I was kind

02:02:41.840 of set up to see success. And often to like my thresholds would just get better every time I

02:02:49.120 would attempt it. Right. As the buildup is going, I'm getting stronger. I'm getting in better shape.

02:02:54.600 I'm also getting lighter, which is making things a little bit easier. And so usually I've seen pretty

02:02:58.960 good progress from that 12 week buildup where I'm getting pretty. What would happen though,

02:03:04.980 more likely than not, in almost every single buildup I have is you get little niggles,

02:03:09.340 right. Where you get little like foot pain, little knee pain, just little things that pop up. So if

02:03:15.180 I missed a workout is usually more for that reason. And then that's when you got to like go to the

02:03:20.220 cross training, which is an area of also like learned in and grown so much in and utilize a lot

02:03:26.480 more now as a coach than when I was running. But when I was a runner, I was just kind of like the old

02:03:30.300 school, like, like run or die kind of mentality, which is not, not a helpful mentality to have.

02:03:35.700 So what did you expect to happen on that April day in 2011?

02:03:40.220 So I was coming off a terrible half marathon. So a month before that race, I ran, I don't even,

02:03:46.500 I can't even tell you my time. I don't think I ever looked it up. It was like 66 minutes or

02:03:50.140 something for half marathon, which is, you know, seven minutes off my personal best and training

02:03:54.940 had been going super well. Things have been clicking well. I thought I was in really good

02:03:58.200 shape. It's kind of one of those scenarios where you go to the start with this really high

02:04:01.720 expectation, but then it's easy to have that like shattered, you know? And so things just

02:04:06.360 weren't clicking in the race, created negative mindset, negative snowball excitement gone.

02:04:12.120 And then you're just trying to get to the finish line, you know? So not a good run at all. Super

02:04:16.300 been out of shape afterwards. Cause I didn't know why.

02:04:18.980 How long was that before the Boston marathon?

02:04:21.820 A month out. Yeah. That's one that you want to go well to create confidence. Right. And

02:04:26.400 I didn't know why it went so bad. I had nothing I could put my finger on. So those are the hardest

02:04:31.000 ones to manage mentally. Right. But you know, I got back up and just started training again. And

02:04:36.060 I found this over and over again, not just with myself, but with athletes like coach,

02:04:40.200 oftentimes like these races, when you're in heavy marathon training won't go well,

02:04:44.460 but then they'll turn something on inside of you. It's like neurologically, all of a sudden you're

02:04:48.600 like firing. And so I came out of that race and just started feeling phenomenal. Like,

02:04:53.880 like similar to how I felt before Houston. And it was a very like quick change. It was like the next

02:04:59.280 week, all of a sudden I was like, like I said, training been going well before, but it got taken

02:05:03.640 even to the next level. And there's all these different factors going into why that might've

02:05:07.940 been. I think the race helped. Also, we headed back to Stanford to train at sea level. And so that

02:05:12.880 it was very much how we'd utilize altitude pre kids. We have kids now, so we can't do this,

02:05:17.980 but we had spent like two months up at altitude, drop down to sea level for a month,

02:05:22.100 go back up, drop back down. And that was taken from Jack Daniels, who's done a ton,

02:05:27.120 a ton of research in the running space. I think probably one of the most brilliant minds in

02:05:31.060 running, in my opinion, especially from a scientific perspective. And I was asking him

02:05:36.260 corresponding with him and like, Hey, what's the best way to utilize altitude? And that's

02:05:39.260 what he recommended. It's like, go up to altitude, shoot back down. Cause what you see

02:05:42.900 is you see a big dramatic increase in your hematocritic hemoglobin early on in those first three

02:05:48.100 weeks. And then it just starts to taper off. Right. And so then you, then you head back down

02:05:52.400 to sea level and it's going to go back down. But then you see when you come back up to altitude,

02:05:56.920 again, another big dramatic shift. So you always want that shifting up. Right. So that's what we're

02:06:02.820 doing. We head back down to sea level. And again, there's positives to training at sea level. Like

02:06:07.740 I'm sleeping way better when I'm at sea level, I'm running faster. I'm able to do workouts. I can't

02:06:14.020 do at altitude. And so things just started clicking like crazy. I also started having caffeine every

02:06:19.960 single day. And that was the first time my career, I started doing this. And so I started running my

02:06:25.100 easy runs a lot quicker. And I have no idea if this like was something that was obviously it worked,

02:06:30.820 but I don't know if it was in despite of this or because of this, you know, but I was running a lot

02:06:36.600 of my easy runs at like five 3520 pace and just like floating through it. Just feeling even like the

02:06:42.700 day before the race do an easy 30 minute run plus like six by a hundred meter strides. That's kind

02:06:47.620 of a custom run for us before the marathon. I'm so glad Sarah wasn't there. My wife,

02:06:52.220 because she would have killed me for running as fast as I did. I was by myself and I was just

02:06:55.560 hammering. I was running like five 30 pace, but it was just easy. I was just floating. Wasn't even

02:07:00.160 breathing. What would be the difference in your hematocrit? How much would your hematocrit vary

02:07:03.780 between sea level and elevation? That's a good question. You know, I don't remember off the top of my

02:07:10.140 head. We weren't super great about doing blood work. I wish we had done more of that. We would

02:07:14.660 do it just kind of like, it seemed like random times, you know, we popped down the Olympic training

02:07:18.780 center, get some blood work done and see where it was at. But to be honest, I can't remember

02:07:24.540 the differences, but it would come up pretty significantly in those first three weeks for

02:07:29.860 sure. So yeah, just feeling like a million bucks heading into that race. But I did have this like

02:07:35.640 thing hovering over me of like, you just tanked a half marathon kind of thing. Then the day before

02:07:41.440 the race, I remember talking to the race, one of the race organizers. And she's telling me like,

02:07:46.000 you know, like we're supposed to get a really good tailwind tomorrow. Right. And I was just,

02:07:50.460 when I heard that I just lit up inside because I get excited about running fast. Like I'd rather

02:07:55.280 break a world record than win a gold medal. Like that's just how I am, you know? And I remember

02:08:01.480 talking to Bill Rogers who won the Boston marathon four times, won New York four times. And he was

02:08:06.280 telling me, he's like, he's like, you know, about once every 10 years, you get a wicked tailwind in

02:08:10.360 Boston and you can really roll. So he had a year when he got a tailwind, he stopped four times in

02:08:15.360 the race to like tie his shoe to walk, to get water. And he still ran 209. And so I, his words were in my

02:08:23.040 head and standing on the starting line in Hopkinton that morning. And I'm looking at the flag and it's just

02:08:29.100 going the exact direction we're going to run. I was like, I'm never, never going to get a day like

02:08:34.600 this again. Like I'm make the most of it. And I always like to go to the front and lead. Like

02:08:38.220 that was kind of my signature, but I didn't let one moment go by in that race where I wasn't

02:08:43.120 pressing. I was like, I'm going to get everything I can out of every single mile. And so we were

02:08:47.660 rolling. We were like a lot of our miles in the four thirties during that race. We came through the

02:08:52.480 half in 61 52, I believe was our split. The race organizer was on a motorcycle.

02:08:58.880 In front of us. And he saw our split at halfway, saw the clock. And he's like, he radioed his clock

02:09:03.580 guys. He's like, Hey, you guys messed up the clocks. It says 61 50. They're like, yeah, that's

02:09:07.980 right. And so we were, I mean, at the time, the world record, I believe was like low 204. And so

02:09:14.360 we're, you know, under world record pace. And again, like the first half of the Boston marathon is

02:09:18.520 slightly down. So, and we had the wind at our backs. And you have heartbreak hill at the very end as

02:09:22.800 well. Yeah. You have heartbreak hill, like all through 17 and a half miles till 20. It's like up and

02:09:28.460 downhills. So it's, it's typically known as a challenging, slow course. But again, if you get

02:09:33.100 the right wind and you make the most of it, cause these aren't pace races either. Like most fast

02:09:37.700 races, you have pacemakers in there and they're in charge of pace. Guys are just tucked in for most

02:09:42.560 first 20 miles at least. And then they're off and running the last 10 K well in this race,

02:09:47.480 there's just me at the front, just hammering and all of Africa sitting on my back behind me,

02:09:52.480 enjoying the ride, but I didn't care. I was like, I'm going to make the most of today.

02:09:55.940 I remember one, one memory from that race was one of the guys on the side of the road,

02:09:59.760 like some of the spots, like especially early on in Hopkinton, you're just going through

02:10:02.960 neighborhoods and stuff, people out in their lawn chairs. And one of the guys yelling at me,

02:10:06.500 he's like, Hey Ryan, don't let them steal your tailwind. And I was thinking about that for a

02:10:11.220 while. I was like, is that possible? It's like, I don't think so. But lots of kind of funny,

02:10:15.940 funny memories from that. And it was just cool to like be with those guys, be in the lead group and,

02:10:21.120 and also to get to push them along to something that would have, it was a super historic day,

02:10:27.220 you know, like the top two guys went on to run two Oh three low, like two Oh three Oh four or

02:10:33.120 something like that, which was well, like almost a minute under the world record at the time.

02:10:37.820 And, uh, you know, I finished fourth and ran two Oh four 58, but I'll never forget. Uh, another

02:10:43.700 memorable part of the race was coming through with a mile to go and, uh, seeing they have a clock at a

02:10:48.340 mile to go. And it was right at two hours. Right. But I'm in the like serious pain cave,

02:10:53.640 right. It went out super fast, super late in the race. No one's around me. And I'm just like

02:10:58.320 holding on for dear life. And I was like, I saw two hours flat. I was like, okay, like if I break

02:11:04.860 five minutes for this last mile, like I'm going to be under two Oh five. My PR at the time was two Oh six

02:11:10.260 17. So I was already getting, I was going to run a big PR no matter what. I was like two Oh five.

02:11:14.980 That's insane. That sounds pretty good. You know? And there's a part of me that is like,

02:11:18.320 just enjoy this last mile run like five 30, just soak it all in and just enjoy it. But then there

02:11:24.520 was a part of me is like, you know what? You might never be here again. Like, why don't you just put

02:11:28.140 your head down, grit your teeth and bear it, try to break five and get under two Oh five. And so

02:11:33.180 that's what I did. And it was a world of pain. That last mile is a blur. The crowds in Boston are

02:11:38.420 just insane though. Like I'll never forget running down Boylston street and just the crowds just going

02:11:42.960 crazy. And, you know, I was in fourth place, but I didn't even care because like to me,

02:11:47.680 performance shifted away from like beating other people to me maximizing my own potential.

02:11:53.880 And that's what I get most excited about. And it's like that with my lifting too. It's like,

02:11:57.460 there's guys dead lifting well over double what I'm able to do. Right. But to me, like,

02:12:02.180 that's not important. It's about like me optimizing what I've been given my gift and also just seeing

02:12:07.180 the fun part of the scene, the growth and the improvement. Right. So coming across the finish line,

02:12:12.020 I just like put my hands out and just soaked it all in, yelled super loud. My wife was there at the

02:12:17.100 finish to give me a big hug. And, uh, it was super special. I felt like I'd won the race,

02:12:22.280 even though I hadn't, but one of those, those moments where it's like, this is again, like

02:12:27.000 Houston, like one of those magical days that, you know, you may never get again. So just soak it all

02:12:32.160 in and enjoy it. But yeah, special day. To me, the most amazing part of your journey is not the

02:12:37.680 successes. It's the way in which you've been able to kind of carry yourself through the failures.

02:12:41.760 Right. And I think you've got this parallel between 07 and 08. Right. And then we see it

02:12:47.700 again now here in 11 and 12. So how are you feeling going into London? Again, I think the

02:12:53.140 expectations early in that season are very high, right? Yeah. Coming out of a 204, I was, you know,

02:13:00.720 I was like, I'm going to take a shot at winning this race, even though, you know, I'd just been

02:13:03.980 beaten by a minute by those guys. So I knew, I knew it wasn't, you know, like I was expected to

02:13:09.760 necessarily win, but I knew I had a shot. Like, you know, if you run 204 for the marathon in those

02:13:15.000 days, like you have a chance to win a gold medal. So, and again, I, this was a theme going back to

02:13:21.060 Beijing, talking about not putting on the weight after I ran London, leading up to the buildup for

02:13:25.780 Beijing and how that made my training flat. I did the same thing. And this is one of those things

02:13:31.460 where it's like, okay, like having a coach is a helpful thing. Cause if a coach, if I would have told

02:13:36.540 a coach what I was going to do, he'd have been like, that's a really bad idea. Let's just stick

02:13:40.100 with what we know works for you in this situation. And that's putting on 10 pounds. But instead of

02:13:44.700 doing that again, my heart was good. My intentions were good. I was like, okay, like, again, like

02:13:48.760 faith's a big part of who I am. I really want to hear God in a way that people use across all

02:13:54.060 traditions to do this is through fasting, right? So I, instead of putting on 10 pounds, I did a one

02:14:00.180 week fast. How close to the Olympics? So let's see, Boston was April 15th and the Olympics were,

02:14:06.520 August. So, you know, it was enough time to where I was going to get a full buildup for the,

02:14:12.260 for the game. So I had plenty of time to like put on weight and do my usual thing. But again,

02:14:16.660 I just wanted, I wanted clarity on how to train for this thing. And so instead of my weight going

02:14:22.160 from one 37 to one 50 during that two week period, it went from one 37 to like one 30 flat. And that was

02:14:31.280 just, I started the training in a really depleted state. My body wasn't in a good state. I

02:14:36.480 mentally and spiritually, I was in the best spot I'd ever been, but my body wasn't ready to go at

02:14:41.780 all. It was, it was needing a break after that, you know, but I began my training and came back and

02:14:47.820 I was running pretty well initially. And then it just kind of went downhill from there. And it actually

02:14:52.560 kind of became a miracle that I even made it to the starting line, considering how poorly my training

02:14:57.940 was going, just nothing was working. And this is what I tell myself in the weight room now,

02:15:02.840 all the time where I'm getting stale and training and not seeing growth. If I'm not eating enough

02:15:08.600 food, if I'm not taking enough calories, it doesn't matter how I'm training. It's not going to work.

02:15:13.000 And that's, that's how it was for me in that buildup is like my body is depleted. I didn't

02:15:17.080 have enough calories on board. So it didn't matter how I train. It wasn't going to work. So just

02:15:20.500 a frustrating period of training leading up to that actually had to take my watch off for all my

02:15:25.880 workouts. Cause it was so discouraging to see what my workouts were and see how slow I was running

02:15:31.300 them compared to what I was accustomed to. So that was good for my mental health. And I think there

02:15:35.500 is a point that can be helpful for people out there. Sometimes just get away from the data,

02:15:40.020 take all that stuff off and just go off feel. And that was helpful, but it wasn't enough to get my

02:15:45.100 body back into the state it needed to be in. What did you feel at the start line in London?

02:15:49.960 Was there any hope in you at that point? Or were you like, look, I'm here at this point out of an

02:15:54.580 obligation to my country. I'm representing my country. I'm wearing the flag of my country,

02:15:58.980 but this is going to be the most difficult two hours of my life.

02:16:03.860 Yeah. You know, there's, I'm a very optimistic person, so I'm pretty good at generating hope.

02:16:09.360 So, and it did help not timing my workouts. So there was a little bit of mystery of thinking,

02:16:14.140 oh, maybe I'm actually in a lot better shape than I think and feel here, you know? So there was some

02:16:19.120 genuine hope on the starting line that, Hey, and that's the thing with running that I've experienced.

02:16:24.640 Sometimes like training can go really bad and you can just pop one, have a big day.

02:16:28.320 So there's always that kind of thought in my head of like, let's not think that something

02:16:33.380 special couldn't happen today. Cause it could, but it became obvious, like really early on in the

02:16:38.240 race, the pace felt super hard, super fast. And then as is the case, oftentimes when I get too lean

02:16:44.240 and too light, I have all these injury issues, right? So like I had all this hip stuff going on

02:16:49.500 before the race. Luckily, like my Cairo guy, John balls, amazing, had me in one piece on the starting

02:16:55.280 line. But then very early on in the races, like then my right hamstring started hurting. And

02:17:00.360 that's ultimately what led me to drop out. As I was in the middle of that race, I was already

02:17:04.820 starting to limp a little bit. It wasn't even the middle. It was early on. It was like seven miles

02:17:08.860 into the race and I was limping. I was like, all right, like, what do I do here? What's the right

02:17:14.060 call? You're trying to kind of coach yourself through it, not give up hope. But then at the same

02:17:17.780 time you want to be smart. Cause this is my livelihood, you know, and I'm looking out for the long

02:17:21.820 term. And, you know, I was like, if, if I, I'll, I'm willing to be that guy who like comes limping

02:17:27.440 in like seven hours after everyone and gets the, the cheers and inspires people for just hanging in

02:17:33.520 there. But at the same time, like, I also want to be good to my body, you know, and I've been not

02:17:38.680 good to my body a lot. And, uh, that was just kind of like a moment where I had a sense of clarity

02:17:45.000 that I needed to be good to myself and call it a day. So that was actually the first race I ever

02:17:50.040 dropped out of in my life was the London marathon. And it felt so surreal. I remember stepping off

02:17:55.680 the, cause it's a loop course, you know, as you're going past the finish and the start

02:17:59.240 a number of times. And I think it was the second loop. I could be wrong on that, but I think it was

02:18:04.000 the second loop when I dropped out and I remember stepping off and I almost started running again.

02:18:09.160 Cause it just felt so wrong. It felt so weird. It felt like I was in someone else's movie or something,

02:18:14.760 but then ultimately I just, you know, walked off the course and then began the long process of,

02:18:21.020 of working through that mentally and emotionally, you know,

02:18:24.160 What was that like?

02:18:25.620 Well, it started with Cinnabon.

02:18:29.660 Funny, funny thing. So the next day I'm like touring around with my family in London and, uh,

02:18:35.160 Sarah knows like how I tend to go to food when I get emotionally low, you know,

02:18:39.200 I can relate.

02:18:41.160 Yeah. So we pop out of the subway onto the streets and it's like, it's like Cinnabon is like heaven.

02:18:46.820 It's like, right. My eyesight's just like, ah, Cinnabon. And she sees me look at it. She looks at

02:18:52.880 me and she knows exactly where I'm going. You know, she's like, don't do it. Don't do it.

02:18:58.040 But of course I went to Cinnabon, got a big old cinnamon roll. Now I'm sitting out on the curb,

02:19:02.480 just eating it. And I look up and like, someone's like taking a picture of me eating my Cinnabon.

02:19:07.180 And I was like, ah, I felt like I was going to be on like Esquire magazine or something.

02:19:13.080 No, actually, uh, I've learned to pick myself up so many times. I've gotten a lot better at it.

02:19:19.200 And for me, it's kind of like, I need this period of just being sad and just let myself be sad for

02:19:25.340 however long that takes the period of kind of like mourning the loss, you know, cause this was a big

02:19:29.560 goal for me. And then for me, the next step then is like, okay, restore hope. So what is the next

02:19:36.200 thing I'm going after? Find that target, put it on the calendar that begins to restore my hope.

02:19:42.200 And then like, I have a little meeting with myself of things I'm going to tweak,

02:19:45.660 do differently, do better. So that also gives me just way more hope that I'm not just going to

02:19:50.060 repeat the same experiment I just did. Right. So like, I'm doing this right now with myself.

02:19:54.880 I'm going back after this sub five minute mile and sub five deadlift. I'm like, I'm going to tweak

02:19:59.500 this, this, and this. And like, I really believe it's going to work this time. Right. And so

02:20:03.820 you've got to, you've got to, that's the starting ground. You have to believe that your training is

02:20:07.740 going to work. That's why it's so important for athletes to believe in their coach. Like

02:20:11.160 if you don't think it's going to work, it doesn't matter what you can prescribe. It's probably not

02:20:14.760 going to work. Right. So that, that belief is so, so important. So, you know, I picked myself up and

02:20:20.300 got going again, but then the problem was, and is common in the case with runners is then you have

02:20:25.540 all these compensation issues. Right. So I had that, that issue in my upper high hamstring where it

02:20:31.160 attaches there and then just ran through that. And that started by the way, because I had plantar

02:20:36.420 fasciitis training for the 2012 Olympic trials. I got that right before the trials, had no choice,

02:20:42.220 had to run through it. And then that persisted for like eight months. And so low compensation,

02:20:47.080 get an injury on the other side and upper hamstring in the games. Then I tore my left quad building up

02:20:52.100 for New York. I tore my right quad building up for Boston. Then I got a sacral stress fracture on my

02:20:59.180 left side after that training for my next marathon. It was literally marathon after marathon. I'd sign

02:21:04.420 up for it, get the deal all worked out, not be able to do it. Cause I'd get some huge injury that

02:21:10.120 would put me out for a long time. And I didn't have a lot of injuries leading up to that. I always

02:21:13.580 consider myself to be super durable. And, uh, yeah, so there's just injury after injury. And that's

02:21:19.580 kind of that four year wild ride of trying everything I could think to try. And ultimately nothing was

02:21:25.900 working. But, you know, as I look back at it now, I really think a big piece of it was the nutrition

02:21:31.020 piece. And I started to be in a better mental health point to where like, I didn't have to use

02:21:37.040 food as like a binging mechanism for after these bad races, but that actually, I still needed to put

02:21:43.480 on the weight though. Right. I still need to get my body in a good spot. And I wasn't doing that

02:21:48.020 because I didn't need to do it from an emotional mental standpoint. But then that was also killing me at

02:21:53.400 the same time, physically speaking. Right. So looking back at it, I would say that was a big,

02:21:59.200 big part of why I had so many struggles from 2012 up until my retirement in 2016. And if I could go

02:22:05.580 back and do it differently, I'd actually do something like my mom always wanted me to do. And I never

02:22:10.120 wanted to. And that is to, she's like, you should just take like three months completely off and like

02:22:14.780 not run at all. And I was like, you crazy. Like I'm never going to do that, you know, but that actually

02:22:19.980 would have been super helpful. Just get away from it, get my body back in a completely good spot.

02:22:25.740 And now, you know, like I feel so much better in my current lifestyle, focus on the lifting,

02:22:31.320 doing very minimal on the endurance end. And even like my testosterone, I just got a testosterone

02:22:36.320 blood test result recently, and it came back at a thousand. And like, I didn't think that was

02:22:40.780 possible for me. But again, the lifestyle shift, lifting heavy, eating more calories,

02:22:46.380 just having my body in a better state, sleeping a ton is just, it allowed me to kind of like

02:22:51.920 restore myself. And that was exactly what my body was telling me. It was like, I've, I felt like my

02:22:56.860 body was saying to me, I've given so much to you over the last 20 years. Like you pounded me into

02:23:01.780 the ground with a hundred mile weeks after a hundred mile weeks. Now it's time to get back to

02:23:05.720 me. And so that's ultimately like why I got into the lifting. I was like, I want to get back to my

02:23:10.600 body. I want to build it back up. I want to make it strong. And there's this thing of like,

02:23:14.760 okay, like I did something I was genetically gifted at. Now let me see what I can take

02:23:19.760 something where I'm not genetically gifted at all the opposite of that. And again, I just love like

02:23:25.000 the challenge. I love lifting hard. So every single day I'm in the weight room, I go to failure

02:23:29.480 and I know that's not recommended, but that's just who I am. That's what I love to do. So that's,

02:23:33.420 that's what I do, you know? So I feel like in a really good spot now, but I'm curious, like if I

02:23:39.600 would have allowed myself to get into a similar state as I am now, and then went back to the running,

02:23:44.500 how that could have went, but the ship has definitely sailed on that, you know, walking

02:23:48.920 around at 185 pounds now, or even like I'll go for runs and it feels like a completely different

02:23:55.460 sport at this body weight compared to, you know, 137 pounds. Yeah. And it's even different from

02:24:01.500 cycling. I mean, both sports punish you for the weight, but one of them, you feel it much more

02:24:05.680 than the other. I mean, in running, it changes your gate. I mean, my wife, even though she weighs

02:24:10.680 exactly what she weighed before having kids, she's tried to explain to me that the shape of

02:24:16.600 her pelvis has changed since having three kids. And she said she has ever since having the,

02:24:23.240 especially the boys, cause they were so big. She's like, I've never felt the same running again.

02:24:27.760 She's still, you know, way thin 110 pounds to me looks like she has a nice stride, but she's like,

02:24:33.820 it doesn't feel the same. I don't have, I don't float anymore. Like literally her pelvis is just

02:24:40.420 in a different shape now. So that's an example of something that I think women can experience.

02:24:45.040 And then of course, just the change in weight. Yeah. It's huge. It's huge.

02:24:51.260 So what would you say to someone who says, I love exercise, but cardio is the only thing that matters.

02:24:57.560 And they're not doing a hundred mile weeks, but they're doing something cardio every day. And

02:25:01.960 they're sort of averse to strength training, given that you've experienced both ends of this spectrum

02:25:07.200 and at very extreme levels, how do you think about this in terms of overall health beyond performance?

02:25:13.940 Yeah. I mean, I think you, when you think of health, you have to think about all these different

02:25:18.100 levels of health, right? So like, what is your hormonal health? Like, cause that's going to really

02:25:23.260 affect like your mental health, like how motivated you are, your energy levels, all that stuff. Right.

02:25:28.740 So I just know from myself, my own experience, like number one, like you can run every single

02:25:34.300 day and be healthy. Right. But you do need something to, especially as you're getting older

02:25:39.200 to offset how depleting of the body that can be. Right. And that's where heavy lifting comes

02:25:45.040 in. And I think I, I just say the word heavy and I can feel like all the runners being like,

02:25:49.120 Oh, I don't want to do that. And I was the same way. I hated lifting heavy, but I think there are,

02:25:53.960 there's ways around that, you know, and like we're, we mentioned BFR a little bit. Like I,

02:25:58.760 I love BFR for runners. Cause like, if you're not, here's the thing with lifting, like I've been

02:26:03.640 lifting super heavy for six years and I've never gotten hurt lifting, but that's just because I'm

02:26:08.540 in, and I have crap form when it comes to a lot of things too. So it's not because my form is good,

02:26:13.740 but I am intuitive in there. Right. Like if something's not feeling right, like I don't put on

02:26:18.840 the way I don't go down, like I'm very cautious in the weight room. Right. So there are ways to like

02:26:24.580 lift heavy and healthy for runners. For example, the stuff that I love to prescribe to our runners

02:26:30.680 are hex bar deadlift with the handles up. So you're not going down as low. You're not loading up the

02:26:35.620 lower back as much. That's much more running specific strength. That is going to be great for

02:26:40.920 your power development. I also love half squats for the same reason. Like a lot of running is just hip

02:26:46.240 extension, right? It's like every time your foot contacts the ground, your, your hips have to

02:26:50.920 extend to get out of that position. So we need to do things that really focus on that. So half squats

02:26:55.480 great for that. And your liability of getting hurt half squatting is way less than butt to the ground.

02:27:00.540 So you can load up the bar super heavy with the half squat, get all the hormonal benefits of lifting

02:27:06.060 heavy, get the bone benefits of loading up a bar and having it on your back and avoid things like

02:27:11.640 stress reactions, your bone density up that way. And just feel really good coming

02:27:16.120 out. There's just no other feeling than like lift, having a bunch of weight on your back and

02:27:20.920 setting it down. You just get this like huge rush of like, I don't know what is endorphins energy,

02:27:25.680 but I always just feel amazing coming out of the weight room energy wise, you know? So there are

02:27:30.240 ways to lift heavy in a healthy way. And then again, like if you don't even have access to heavy

02:27:35.600 weights, you can do things like BFR. And, uh, I've, I've been playing a lot with BFR and I really like

02:27:41.240 the feel of that as well. And I think it's a way for, for runners who are maybe skinny, more

02:27:45.020 concerned about getting hurt to get the same benefits of lifting heavy without having to put

02:27:50.020 a bunch of weight on the bar. Do you ever have runners run in blood flow restriction? I, for the

02:27:55.700 first time, really like couple of weeks ago, did some sets on the air bike. So like, you know,

02:28:01.000 those airdyne bikes, I did like two minute sets with heavy BFR on my upper thighs. And I remember

02:28:07.800 thinking, well, I remember not knowing what to expect, right? I remember thinking, okay, for two

02:28:11.880 minutes I should be able to hold 300 Watts or whatever. And it's like no freaking way. Like I

02:28:18.580 was struggling to hold 200 Watts for two minutes. And it wasn't that my heart and lungs were blowing

02:28:25.720 up. It was like just the absolute pain in my legs. So I thought that was kind of interesting. And I was

02:28:31.760 like, huh, I wonder if, you know, I was still cycling. Like if this would be an interesting form

02:28:36.160 of cross training, I don't know if it would translate to running because I can't really walk when I'm in the

02:28:41.740 full BFR. So maybe it, maybe it just wouldn't work and maybe it would be, maybe it's only amenable to

02:28:46.420 being on a bike. But, and I also think there's certain exercises. Like I once stupidly tried to

02:28:51.180 deadlift with BFR. It was, it was very lightweight, but I also thought it was altering my form a little

02:28:57.340 bit. And I didn't think, I didn't think that would be beneficial. So, but I love it. I do BFR every day

02:29:02.540 that I lift. I do at least one to two sets. That's interesting. I'm definitely going to try the BFR on a run

02:29:07.880 next time I go for run. I'll be curious to try that. Yeah. I don't, you won't be able to go as

02:29:11.740 heavy as you do for less, like at least on my device, it allows me to select low, medium or

02:29:16.540 high intensity. So maybe if you set it on a lower intensity, but if anyone's going to experiment with

02:29:22.420 it, it's you. So I'm curious to hear what you mean. Yeah, I'll try that out. Something else I wanted to

02:29:26.260 ask you about, which is we talk about sports like cycling, where drug use is just the norm. It's,

02:29:31.220 there's never really been a clean era of cycling. We're probably in the cleanest era now for the last

02:29:36.660 10 years, but there was just no way you were going to be able to compete and be one of the 10 best

02:29:42.020 cyclists in the world. If you weren't using a performance enhancing drug, non-negotiable.

02:29:46.180 So if you didn't want to use those things, you were free not to, but you were not going to be in

02:29:49.900 the top hundred or whatever. How much, well, I guess it doesn't seem to me that distance running

02:29:56.620 has suffered the same thing, right? We see it in track and field all the time. How much buzz has there

02:30:02.640 been about performance enhancing drugs at the marathon level, at the world-class marathon

02:30:07.120 level? I haven't been paying attention to it, but I really don't remember hearing much about it. And

02:30:10.640 I'm curious as to whether or not that's been your experience. And if so, why, why do you think that

02:30:14.480 marathon runners, which would certainly benefit from tons of PEDs haven't traditionally used them?

02:30:20.880 Yeah. I think the thing that is the culture, right? So for me, I knew guys who a hundred percent

02:30:28.120 weren't on it and were winning races. Meb, for example, he's, he's winning Boston, he's winning

02:30:32.640 New York, he's winning medals. Dina's winning a medal at the Olympics and a hundred percent.

02:30:37.160 No, they're not on it. Right. So I think that's huge, right? If you can think of one person who's

02:30:42.300 doing what you want to do and they're not on it, you're like, then I can too. You know,

02:30:46.560 you look at like Lance and the cycling culture and it's like, if that's not the case, then it becomes

02:30:51.460 very difficult. Like to me, to be optimistic on the starting line. Right. So like, I always chose to

02:30:57.480 believe everyone was innocent, even if I heard rumblings, just because like, I didn't want to

02:31:03.080 be at a mental disadvantage. Like if I believe this person next to me is on something, then they

02:31:07.460 already got one on me because I think they're just going to be superhuman because they're on the PD,

02:31:13.240 you know? So I always just believed everyone was innocent. I never like concerned myself with too

02:31:17.300 much about it. And also like, honestly, I've been around a lot of training groups in the U S a lot of

02:31:22.560 different athletes. I've never heard of anyone talking about taking it about having

02:31:27.100 access to it. Like I wouldn't even know the first step to even like, how do you even find this

02:31:32.400 stuff? You know, whereas there, it's not like that everywhere though. You know, like I've been in

02:31:37.900 Kenya and they talk about it a lot over there and I'm not saying like Kenyans are dirty or anything

02:31:42.420 like that, but there, the culture there is one where it's talked about more there. And I think that

02:31:47.800 alone makes you think more athletes are on it. And, and there have been like guys getting busted,

02:31:53.120 um, not just from Kenya, but from all over the world, you know? So it does happen occasionally

02:31:57.420 in running. What are the drugs of choice? Is it EPO? Is it testosterone? EPO. And then there's,

02:32:02.680 you know, lots of like kind of gray line stuff too, where people are just looking for every advantage

02:32:07.380 they can get and maybe crossing some of those lines and with Alberto and all that. Yeah, that's

02:32:12.620 right. I forgot about that. What was the controversy around Alberto Salazar? It was a large document of

02:32:18.340 case thing of all this stuff that was supposedly going down. Honestly, like I kind of stayed out of

02:32:23.500 all that and didn't even follow it closely. So I, I wouldn't even be able to do a good job.

02:32:27.540 I didn't either. But you're right. I guess I, there, there has been some rumbling about it.

02:32:32.380 Um, you obviously spent a lot of time in Africa. I know you've adopted four girls from Ethiopia,

02:32:38.340 which probably speaks not just to your, you know, sort of love of children, but also like

02:32:43.460 how much you've embraced that East African culture, having spent as much time there as you have,

02:32:50.360 do you have a sense of what makes them great? How much of it is their genetics? How much of it is the

02:32:57.640 environment in which they're raised? How much of it is the training, the mindset? Again, I would

02:33:03.180 imagine if you're born poor in Ethiopia or Kenya, running as a way out would be viewed as playing in

02:33:12.280 NFL here or playing in the NBA or the major leagues. Like it's a, it's, it is their sport. So when you

02:33:19.260 think about all of these different factors, what explains the absolute greatness of this population

02:33:26.680 in this really relatively small part of the world? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the perfect storm of kind

02:33:32.300 of everything you mentioned, right? It's like highly motivated individuals who are highly genetically

02:33:37.840 gifted. Like you were talking about your wife's pelvis and it widening. There's like, I think

02:33:42.960 some theories about their pelvis being really small and that being helpful for distance running. But

02:33:46.980 I mean, like, I just, I walk behind my kids on hike sometimes and just look at how narrow their

02:33:52.460 shoulders are and how small their bone structure is. Right. And I'm just like, this is crazy. Like

02:33:58.680 they're just so small. And like, I'd be running next to highly give a slossy, one of the greatest

02:34:03.160 distance runners of all time. And I remember the first time I ran with him at the London marathon,

02:34:07.320 I caught up to his group and I was like, I'm running next to highly like, this is insane.

02:34:11.360 And I just could not get over how small he was. I was just staring at his back. I was like, this guy

02:34:16.200 is tiny. So, I mean, there's like this whole huge, like their, their makeup, their body. And to be

02:34:22.460 honest with you, I think there's a lot more there actually. I think they can run a lot faster than

02:34:27.940 they're even running. I'm curious, like their approach to train versus our approach to training,

02:34:33.340 who's doing it right. Not that it's one or the other, you know, it's probably like a blend of

02:34:37.240 the two, but. But you're thinking if they, if they adopted some of what you've talked about

02:34:41.580 and what others have talked about, as far as more strength training, more gap between intensities,

02:34:47.080 they might even be able to be better. Yeah. Cooling down, you know, things like that.

02:34:52.680 And what makes Kipchoge so great in your mind? And I mean, I think he really is the greatest

02:34:57.660 marathon runner today. And I don't think that's just on the basis of doing this incredible

02:35:03.040 feat of breaking two hours in a, in a very controlled, unofficial way, but, but also just

02:35:09.020 his overall marathon performance on the racetrack. What is it about Kipchoge? Have you, I don't

02:35:13.880 suppose you ever ran with him, right? Was he there in 16? No, I don't think we ever, we were

02:35:19.820 coming up at the same time. We're very similar in age. I don't know his exact age or if he even

02:35:25.640 knows his exact age, but we're right around the same. So we cross paths a lot. Like I saw him at

02:35:29.640 the London marathon a couple of years ago when I was there, but I think obviously like genetically

02:35:34.980 gifted, but also his like humbleness. I think that's a huge thing. It's like when you start to

02:35:40.360 think you're great and that you've done all this great stuff, it almost makes it harder to get back

02:35:45.280 there. Right. Or to exceed it. It's like when you buy into how great you are that I feel like it

02:35:50.580 kind of sets the limit on you. It's like, that's your cap. Right. And he is so like, I've never seen

02:35:56.060 anyone as successful as he is. He's, I mean, he's gotta be getting huge paydays to do these marathons.

02:36:01.940 Right. And yet living in super simple place with sharing a room with training partners, like, come on,

02:36:09.160 like how many like multi multi millionaires do you know that like do that? Right. So like, I think

02:36:15.080 there's something about like his, his mentality and humbleness. And that's really what I've always

02:36:20.360 found most inspiring about African runners, whether it's from Kenya or Ethiopia and why I enjoy being

02:36:26.200 over there so much and have fallen in love with their culture. It's just this like carefree, fearless

02:36:32.360 mentality of just like, I'm just going to put myself in it and go for it. But Kipchoge also balances that

02:36:38.780 with like being very controlled. It's like he controls his strength so, so well. And I think

02:36:45.580 that kind of sets him apart. Like when you read about his training, he's always talking about running

02:36:50.360 like 80% max and everything being super controlled. And I don't know, like I have personally have not

02:36:56.840 gotten results through that type of training, but it's without a doubt, it's working for him. I mean,

02:37:01.420 he's by far and away the greatest marathoner to ever walk the planet. Right. So whatever he's doing is

02:37:07.340 working, but I honestly, I feel like a big thing is just his mentality. Like his, his mental approach

02:37:13.380 to training and racing is the most composed I've ever seen in an athlete. So I think that's a huge

02:37:20.000 part of it. Do you think we will see a sub two hour marathon as an official marathon in our lifetime?

02:37:26.440 I think we will without a doubt. I mean, so a woman just ran 62 minutes, 62 50 or something for half

02:37:33.800 marathon, which is absolutely insane. So that predicts 210 as a full. Yeah. So, I mean,

02:37:40.480 she could potentially run, be the first woman to break 210 for the marathon. And we're just seeing

02:37:45.600 huge performances like this. And I think the whole show. How much of it is the shoe? Yeah. I was just

02:37:50.420 going to say how much of it is the shoes. Yeah. This shoe thing is really interesting because I don't

02:37:54.740 think it's just the technology, like the technology without a doubt, like people are running two minutes

02:37:59.760 faster over the marathon with these shoes on, but I think it's affected the psyche a ton. I think

02:38:04.840 what people think is possible now has just been blown up. Right. And so now like, we're just getting

02:38:11.000 people trying to do insane stuff. I mean, like a sub two hour marathon, like that would have never

02:38:16.340 happened if we didn't have these shoes. Like I'm sure even Kipchoge wouldn't have even tried. Right.

02:38:21.300 But now it's kind of opening the doors of like, what's possible here. And then you see a woman

02:38:25.220 around 62 minutes for a half. And you're like, if she can run 62 minutes for a half, like in an

02:38:31.000 actual race, that wasn't even a set up Kipchoge type situation. That was an actual race. Like people

02:38:37.000 can do it in the marathon. So I am certain we will see it. And who knows to like what other kind of

02:38:42.640 technological advances will happen in the coming years. But the shoe thing has, has been profound

02:38:48.300 from technology standpoint, but also from a mental standpoint for athletes.

02:38:52.360 Speaking of a mental standpoint of all of the stunts you've done, and I've followed many of them,

02:38:58.200 the seven marathons in seven days, i.e. seven consecutive marathons in seven days on seven

02:39:04.100 continents is in and of itself ridiculous, but it's made only more ridiculous by the fact that you

02:39:10.400 didn't train for it. So tell people a little bit about this thing and the extent to which

02:39:18.140 you both got better during it and then kind of crashed at the end and how painful that last one

02:39:24.700 was. Yeah. So I was retired from pro running and one of my pastor friends from LA, Matthew Barnett

02:39:31.500 texted me. He's like, Hey, I'm doing this crazy challenge, seven marathons, seven days, seven

02:39:34.960 continents. And there's something just captured me about it. Similar actually to when I was 13 and

02:39:40.320 went on that first run around Big Bear Lake. It's like a similar kind of feeling where it's just like,

02:39:44.420 there's just something about this that like, I just got to do it. So I texted him back. I was

02:39:48.580 like, let me know if you want me to join you, man. I'd love to go. And, and again, running zero at

02:39:53.300 this point, just in the weight room, just focus on strength training. He's like, okay, let's go.

02:39:57.820 It's on whatever. So we ended up doing it. And I was, I started training for it. So I was like,

02:40:03.120 okay, like if I'm gonna do this, like I want to enjoy it. But then I was hating the training for it.

02:40:07.860 Wasn't enjoying it. And I was starting to get a lot of those same fatigue issues that came when I was

02:40:12.000 running professionally. So I was like, you know what, either I can enjoy my life for like the nine

02:40:16.520 months leading up to this thing and not run hardly at all, or, and have a really bad week. Or I can

02:40:23.520 like train for it, not really enjoy my life for nine months and then have a good week. I was like,

02:40:27.940 I'll take the, like the nine months of good living. So decided not to train for it. I mean,

02:40:32.820 I did do, I was running like three days a week, like between five and eight miles. Eight miles was my

02:40:38.580 long run leading up to that. And so I was taking on this challenge where we're going to have to run

02:40:43.500 183 miles. I think it is in a week, which is by far the most I'd ever done. I think the most I'd ever

02:40:49.760 done was 140 miles and you're hopping on airplanes. Like you run, you get on the airplane, you run,

02:40:55.420 you get on the airplane. Right. So, uh, yeah, it was quite the experience. Definitely like trip of a

02:41:01.060 lifetime. It was like a group of people. So there's like 30 of us, Richard Donovan puts it on.

02:41:06.080 It's called the world marathon challenge. And he just, the, the guy who puts it on Richard is such

02:41:10.460 amazing dude. This guy's taking 30 people around the world running marathons every day. I never saw

02:41:15.100 him stressed once. I never even saw him close to stressed. How much does one pay for the privilege

02:41:20.400 of doing this? I believe it's like 40 grand. So it's a, it's a bit of a trip, but you're also.

02:41:26.240 Yeah. Cause they're flying you privately. Obviously you're chartering a flight. It's the only way you

02:41:29.860 could make this work. So the first one, I think if I recall was South Africa,

02:41:34.460 Antarctica. So you start in Antarctica. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That was the coolest marathon. You're

02:41:40.560 running on snow. It's like a seven mile loop course. And I thought Antarctica just can be like

02:41:44.420 flat, just white, you know, but there's all these mountains. We're on a glacier. There's all these

02:41:48.420 mountains going. We had to take like a Russian airplane to like get down to there. It looked like

02:41:53.400 something out of a movie. It was, it was super cool. And how did that one feel? It felt pretty good.

02:41:58.420 Actually funny though. I was so super into lifting. Right. So my great idea was to take in 50 grams of

02:42:05.620 protein, like every seven miles or something. Cause I was like, I don't want to lose my gains.

02:42:11.960 So, which is like the opposite of what I usually do. Right. Usually it's like simple sugar.

02:42:16.860 So I'm doing this and I get to like mile 23 of this race and I am so out of it. Like, I'm like,

02:42:23.120 I need sugar, like stat, like right now. Cause my protein bars like hardly had any carbs in it.

02:42:28.860 So they have this little tent that's set up and they, they put all these like dried fruit and candy

02:42:34.060 and stuff in there. And it's an unmanned tent. So I crawl in there and I just grab like as much

02:42:39.240 candy as I can. And I started feeling better immediately. So like right after that, I kind

02:42:47.660 of learned my lesson. I think I ran like three 30 something on that one, which is kind of amazing.

02:42:52.460 Like three 30 is still a fast marathon for a, yeah. Okay. So then where do you guys go from

02:42:58.160 the Antarctica? Where's the next one? So then we went to Chile and we got to sleep in a hotel room

02:43:03.060 that night. So that was nice. Cause there was only two nights during the week where we got to sleep

02:43:06.980 in a hotel room and that was one of them. So ran the next marathon and actually felt pretty good.

02:43:11.700 You know, we're on concrete, not snow. So it felt a little bit better. It was warm.

02:43:15.920 What was the temperature in Antarctica when you were in that?

02:43:18.360 So it was supposedly really cold, but it must be like a dry cold. Cause it didn't

02:43:22.320 feel that bad to me at all. Like I was in my regular run stuff that I'd do if I'm doing a

02:43:26.620 run here in Flagstaff in the winter time. Like I had full tights, I had a long sleeve and I had

02:43:31.380 like a, like a shell jacket and gloves, like mittens and a beanie. And I was totally good.

02:43:36.420 I wasn't sweating at all. Cause they say like, you don't want to sweat cause then it freezes on

02:43:39.880 you and get hypothermia, you know? But, uh, I was, I was totally good.

02:43:44.320 So then South America, you ran, how fast did you run that one?

02:43:47.520 Trying to remember what my time was. I think it was a little bit faster than Antarctica,

02:43:51.600 but not a lot, but I didn't, it was nice. Cause the Antarctica one doesn't beat up your legs

02:43:55.900 cause you're on a snow. So it's a little bit softer. We always do all of our easy running on,

02:44:00.220 on soft surfaces to keep from beating up your legs. And I was also in like the most cushy

02:44:04.640 shoe I could find. Cause I was like, my legs are going to take a beating. Cause I think at that time

02:44:08.740 I was like 170 pounds. So I was prepping myself for that a little bit. Then we flew to Miami and that

02:44:15.820 was kind of fun. It was like a homecoming back to the States, you know, but also warm.

02:44:19.840 I had a little bit more trouble in that one. I think I was a little bit slower than I was

02:44:24.360 in Chile, but not much. Like maybe I was like, again, like three 30 or something like that.

02:44:30.280 And then we flew over to Spain and I had the worst day ever in Spain. Luckily, like one of my Dutch

02:44:36.000 friends, he came over and he was with me on the bike the whole time. And I was just in the worst

02:44:41.000 mood and having the worst day ever. I was like, running is the worst thing on the plan,

02:44:45.600 which I've said that many, many times. That's actually not a new thing for me to say. Even

02:44:51.340 when I was running professionally, running can be like your best friend and like your greatest

02:44:54.900 enemy all at the same time.

02:44:56.240 All right. So that's Europe. So then which continent next Asia?

02:44:59.500 I'm guessing we had to Morocco for Africa. And, uh, we got a hotel room, slept in that one. I was

02:45:06.780 like, all right, considering how bad I felt less than 24 hours ago, I'm going to start out just super

02:45:11.900 chill and just like make it through this. Right. So I start that way. And then again,

02:45:16.960 the mystery of running, why you'd all of a sudden feel so good. I have no idea, but I just started

02:45:22.220 feeling like a million bucks. Like I started charging. Like I felt like my old self, I was

02:45:26.540 like mentally super engaged and like just came home super quick. Like I went out really slow and then

02:45:32.940 ended up running like three Oh four, which for me off like zero training was like really good,

02:45:38.640 you know? And so then I was like pumped. I was like, all right, now it's on. Like I'm going to

02:45:43.000 just get faster and faster every day from here, you know? So then is Dubai the next day?

02:45:48.320 So then, yeah, Dubai's the next day. The problem was though, then after Morocco, I'm walking to get

02:45:53.860 food with my buddy and I just develop a little bit of a limp and he's like, Hey, why are you limping?

02:45:57.980 I was like, ah, my hips kind of bother me a little bit. Uh, whatever, you know, just shake it off.

02:46:02.200 Like you usually do with most running things, you know? But then the next day in Dubai is like

02:46:06.700 my hip was on fire and I was like, this isn't good. Like something's really wrong here. So I

02:46:11.040 ended up walking like the back half of that marathon, a lot of it. So I don't know what

02:46:15.120 my time was there, but it was probably up over four hours, you know? And then we head on the

02:46:19.820 airplane to Sydney for the last marathon in Australia. And it was crazy this whole time.

02:46:25.240 Yeah. We're on a private jet with like, you know, food and everything and movies. I didn't watch one

02:46:29.680 movie the entire week. Whenever I was on the airplane, I was asleep. I was so tired.

02:46:34.340 So we land in Sydney and I tried to stand up and I put weight on that leg where the hip

02:46:41.060 was bothering me. And if that kind of like take your breath away, wincing kind of pain

02:46:45.440 that you get like super sharp. And I was like, Oh, I'm in trouble. This is not good at all.

02:46:51.620 Like I had a hard time putting any weight on it at all. And also to like, I was so sick

02:46:57.520 of all the little tiny things you do as a pro runner, like the mobility, the stretching,

02:47:02.560 all that stuff that I wasn't doing any of that anymore. So I didn't wear my compression

02:47:06.340 socks the entire week. So I got to Sydney and my ankles look like elephant ankles. Like they're

02:47:11.920 so swollen, but like to the point where it was painful. I was like, I didn't know you could

02:47:15.840 actually get pain from this, but like, I could like barely like bend my ankles. I was a mess.

02:47:21.560 So I put on my same singlet that I wore my first marathon at the London marathon, 2006,

02:47:28.640 2007, the same singlet I wore in that race. I put it on. Cause I was like, this is my last marathon.

02:47:33.900 Like, this is my goodbye tour here. You know, the same way I went in with a big long run,

02:47:38.800 15 mile run around big bear. I'm going out with a bang too, you know, and I never got to say goodbye

02:47:43.140 to the sport. It's like, I just like kind of faded out and all of a sudden I was gone and my body

02:47:47.180 wasn't able to run. I never got to say goodbye to the sport that I loved. So this was my chance to

02:47:52.540 say goodbye. And so this last marathon, a manly beach, we did a mile out mile back for the whole

02:48:00.200 marathon. But it was, it was sick though. Cause it was lit up by the moon, the stars, all that stuff

02:48:05.920 is just blazing. We're running for some reason. We started like 1am. I was like, why can't we get

02:48:10.220 some more sleep? We're running 1am. Was that because it was too hot to run during the day?

02:48:15.920 No, I think, I think Richard's thought process was just, you wanted to get people enough time to get

02:48:20.380 it done. You know, it'd be like such a sucky thing to like not finish it within the seven day period

02:48:25.680 because you had a really bad last day. So, so I think he's just trying to give people as much time

02:48:30.000 as possible. And so it could have been good. Like for me, like I kind of needed it that day. I like

02:48:35.540 got a massage in the middle of that, but I went on to find out when I went home, got MRI, that is

02:48:40.960 stress reaction in my hip. So massages aren't, aren't the best for stress reaction. Doesn't do a whole lot,

02:48:46.900 but yeah, I'll never forget like coming across that finish line. The sun was up,

02:48:50.380 at that point took me five and a half hours. It was like the longest, slowest, most painful

02:48:55.600 marathon. It's like every time I put my leg down on that concrete, it's just like getting zinged

02:49:00.500 with like that super sharp pain, you know? But I mean, after you've run six marathons in a row,

02:49:05.180 you're like, I'm do whatever it takes to get through the seventh one. Like I'm not stopping

02:49:09.260 now and I'm never signing up for this trip again. So I got to get it done, you know? So I came across

02:49:14.960 the finish line and these are just like all like runs that are set up by volunteers. So not like a ton of

02:49:19.120 people. They're not like big productions, like major marathons, but still super cool.

02:49:23.140 And I came across the finish line and I took off my shoes, left them on the finish line.

02:49:27.760 And it's something I kind of stole from a wrestlers, Olympic wrestlers. After they,

02:49:31.940 they wrestled their last match, they leave their shoes on the mat. It's just kind of

02:49:35.060 the symbolic way of saying like, I've given everything I have to give. And now like the

02:49:39.160 season's over, I'm walking away, leave my shoes on the mat. So I did that. I walked away barefoot

02:49:44.240 from the finish line. And I was actually, even though it was just kind of like me and a couple

02:49:48.160 other people got super emotional at that time. I was like tearing up as I was walking back to the

02:49:52.880 hotel, just cause you know, running gave me so many gifts. It was so life altering for me. And

02:49:58.660 the most beautiful part of all of it was the people, you know, meeting my wife, my kids,

02:50:04.320 all the people I crossed paths with continue. Like I wouldn't be chatting with you right now,

02:50:08.260 Peter, if it wasn't for that, you know, like that is what I hold most dear from all of the

02:50:12.980 experience, you know? And what's cool about that is like, it doesn't matter what level you run at.

02:50:17.100 Like we all get to experience that, you know, you sign up for any race and you're out there with a

02:50:20.880 50,000 amazing people that are on a journey with you and we get to do it together, you know?

02:50:26.660 So that whole sentiment just like hit me super hard, just saying goodbye to the sport I love.

02:50:32.120 But then, you know, it's been such a beautiful transition though, of like realizing that that

02:50:37.620 whole season, it felt like it was for me, you know, like it was my thing that I was going after

02:50:42.560 seeing how good I can get. But I've since kind of realized like, it wasn't just for me. Like

02:50:46.440 everything I learned in that season was meant to be passed down and it was meant to be shared and

02:50:50.660 meant to help other people. So it kind of launched me into the season of moving into the coaching

02:50:54.880 space, coaching my wife, coaching other athletes in person, starting run free training where we

02:50:59.940 coach runners of every single discipline, you know, every level, super slow people, middle school

02:51:06.220 kids, like all the levels. Cause like to us, it doesn't matter where you're at, right? It's a mat.

02:51:10.460 We just want to be on the journey with you and want to guide you well and help you on your

02:51:13.820 journey. So it was really special to kind of like realize that even all the mistakes that

02:51:18.840 I made, they weren't for not, you know, I'm on this podcast. I'm able to share it with your

02:51:22.520 listeners and hopefully they won't make the same mistakes and they'll be better off for

02:51:26.340 it, you know? And that's, that's really kind of like my goal now is like, how can I help

02:51:31.200 people take this thing living to the next, not just running, but living, be happier people.

02:51:37.160 Like I'm far more concerned with my athletes happiness than I am with how fast they are.

02:51:41.020 Right. Like I want them to enter into the good life. And I think running is a way to

02:51:45.460 do that. Lifting can be a way to do that. It adds to that, but more than anything, like

02:51:49.560 I just want them to find, I want them to find joy.

02:51:52.900 Well, Ryan, it's been, it's been a joy sitting here talking with you about this. And I hope

02:51:56.580 we get to meet in person one day because there's a, I hope we get to work out in person one

02:51:59.820 day. Actually, that would be, that would be a ton of fun to lift together. And I'd love to

02:52:04.040 try some of these crazy things you're doing. Not all of them, but I actually, I'm really

02:52:07.560 intrigued by the, I wouldn't be able to do it with a fraction of the weight you just

02:52:11.240 described, but the farmers carries up the Grand Canyon. That's something that I could

02:52:16.040 see wanting to do that one day. The Grand Canyon is such a amazing place to me. I've only been

02:52:20.760 there once, but it, it's still probably one of the most significant things I've ever done.

02:52:26.020 The season of my life in which I got to do it, the manner and how we made it physical.

02:52:29.840 And I sort of made it a hiking swimming trip. So I swam in the Colorado river and then in

02:52:36.320 each of the waterfalls on the way up. Cause you know, you, you have like these four huge

02:52:40.660 waterfalls that get progressively smaller as you go up. And yeah, it was just, I mean,

02:52:44.700 it was just, I was actually just talking about it with one of my kids last night when I was

02:52:47.740 reading him a story and the Grand Canyon came up and he's like, is that a real place? And

02:52:52.400 I was like, yeah, like this is real, man. And when you get, when you guys get a little

02:52:57.120 older, we're going to be going back there. Yeah. You need to bring the kids up,

02:53:01.000 start doing 20 minutes every other day. I'm sure you have 20 minutes and we'll,

02:53:06.160 we'll go do it together. That'd be so fun. Awesome, man. Well, I really appreciate this

02:53:10.860 time, Ryan. And this was a, this was so much fun for me to just kind of be able to pick the brain

02:53:15.700 of one of the world's greatest. I loved it, Peter. Awesome chatting with you, man.

02:53:20.520 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

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The Peter Attia Drive - March 14, 2022

#199 - Running, overcoming challenges, and finding success ｜ Ryan Hall

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