142. Double Threshold Workouts, Black Canyon 100k Recap, and Blood Tests!

Woo hoo. Welcome to the Some Work All Way podcast. We are so happy to with you today. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And David, I feel a little bit like I've been out to see on this. Wait, why have you been out to see, Megan? Because I just got in from a run and it was sports for all weather. So it was beautiful. But right alongside that sports for all weather, I was getting pelted with wind and gravel and all the dust the wind was kicking up. And I feel like I'm just like still rocking over here. Okay. So it makes you feel like you were on a boat is what you're saying from all the wind. Yeah. And you like come back to land and you're still finding your sea legs and you still feel like you're rocking. That's how I feel from being tossed around in the wind. Actually, I don't really know that feeling because I'm more of a land based organism. I'm not really a sea guy, but I can imagine it. I can really picture it in my mind's eye with that would feel like. Well, I'm a sea. I would say I'm not a sea creature either. I love I love me some land. I do not like being on boats, but I happen on boats. Have you never been on a boat before? Not that I know of. Oh my God. Lonely Island is going to be so disappointed. I have not been on a boat motherfucker. Because it's really sad. T-Pain is going to be disappointed. If you don't know that reference, you should definitely Google I'm on a boat. But yeah, so I got to see you out there running in this wind and you looked like you were so floaty and flowing, which is wild because as we talked about on the summer, we'll all play a podcast. We say fuck wind. We are not big fans of wind and it looks like you were loving it. I think I was changing my mind out there, which is shocking because I totally cosign the phrase fuck wind like that. That's how I thought about wind. It's so hard. You can't hear yourself think. It took me biking in the wind and biking in the wind, I would say, is objectively dangerous. And running in the wind, on the other hand, is unpleasant, but I'm not going to die. Yeah. And so it was almost life affirming out there. I was like, I'm doing it. I'm prevailing. These scale force winds. It's great. It's a lesson about like getting to the point where you're like, well, at least I'm not going to die. That like fucking moment is kind of the key to all things. Yeah. And so it was so great to see you out there rocking it in that windy weather because I was reflecting on last July when you had gone through your heart condition, you had gotten pregnant and those two combined to create this really scary combination where you couldn't even move for like 10 weeks. You didn't even get over a thousand steps. I remember walking up the slightest grade outside our house to go fetch Addie and you had to go hands on knees because your heart rate got so high. I think your heart rate was getting to 140 at one or two miles an hour walking. And now you're back fully freaking crushing it, Megan. Thanks. It's been quite the journey. I can't join that process. You describe me as having zero fitness. And it's like that might be a bit of an exaggeration. I think I have negative fitness as I was going through this. I'm a very direct coach. I'm just like, Megan, you got to be honest. You're at zero right now. And you're like, nope, not zero. I am absolutely zero. You're going on the Kelvin scale. Well, there are multiple different time points in which it started, but I remember being at Western States and my athlete Leah Yingling was crushing it. And I tried to run 400 meters over 100 mile race at Forest Hill, which is actually a downhill. Yeah. And I got my ass dropped. And it was so eye opening. And then from there, walking any uphill was hard. And so it's been really meaningful to be on this journey. But as I was out there today, and I think so many different runners, when you've been through a journey like this, where it's not easy, and all of a sudden you come back and you have this run that's feeling like it's flow state, it's that pinnacle of reminding and being like, oh my gosh, I'm coming back. This is great. But all I could think about out there was your brilliance because what? You've helped orchestrate this. We've taken a very kind of a different approach. I haven't done any running workouts, just been doing bike workouts. And I was out there and I was like, coach hubby's brilliant. I love it. I don't know if that's the right way to look at it. But I mean, it's incredibly cool to see. And the training approach has actually been interesting for everyone, I think, in the sense that for you right now, running is a huge stress. You have the autoimmune condition, you're coming back from pregnancy and bones are especially vulnerable in postpartum state. But with running, like just going out there and doing any amount of miles is moderately stressful and you're adapting to that rapidly. So we've moved all of the harder workouts that work cellular level processes related to the aerobic system to cross training. And it's really improved your running economy too. So this might be something that we think about more in the future, particularly postpartum athletes or athletes dealing with injury context is like, okay, running is enough stress as it is. We don't need to add stress too much though soon enough, you're going to begin some hill strikes, girl. Oh, I'm so excited. But I was out there and I was like, what is happening right now? I didn't expect to see these paces dropping so fast on just bike training. And it was this fun moment of being like, David, you're so smart. Well, no, no, it has nothing to do with me. As we said on this podcast too, talent is a motherfucker. You are one talented mother, Megan. So not that much that I think a coach really can do other than get out of the way. And that's kind of what I'm thinking with you right now. And thank you for believing in it. Like, you asked me all the time back then, would you ever get back where you were? And I said, yes, but at the same time, when you're living at right beside an athlete, it's a little different sometimes than when you're seeing it real zoomed out. And part of me was thinking like, is this some longer term process with your heart or whatever? And I admire so much that you told the story as you were going through it. Oh, thanks. So Lauren Fleschman in her book that we're about to talk about says that all these stories are told in retrospect, you know, like you've overcome or whatever. And you were just put yourself out there and like, I think I'm going to get back, but I don't know. And I was kind of right there with you. And so I said, yes, but part of me is like, I just, I'm not sure. And so seeing what you're done, I'm like, wow, the body can accomplish so much. Have you just give it that day by day, like love? And it's a fun reflection. I remember when you asked me that, I was like, you know, I think I can come back as an athlete, but I think deep down, I really was lacking confidence. And now I think I can confidently say like, I know I'll be back. I'm sure it's going to be a roller coaster of all kinds of things as it is for a lot of different runners, but I know that deep down in my heart and it's making running just a lot of fun, even in, even in objectively terrible wins. But I think actually one of my talents is not patience. Yeah. I remember a couple of years ago, I took a personality test and I think I scored in the fourth percentile of patience. So I have objective data that patience is not my strong suit, but it's been my word of this training cycle. And I'm actually, I'm really proud of myself for embodying that. And I'm only running every other day, which is taking a lot of patience and a lot of discipline and it's paying off. How are you holding yourself to that, though? Because I think a lot of athletes understand that, right? They understand intuitively that, oh my gosh, well, if it takes the body only six weeks to heal from a bone breaking through, how much can you accomplish in six months? Like we get that, but that's not how we live life. We live life day to day. So how have you channeled that in a way that like, you know, you were staring down the barrel of maybe the end of your athletic career and like the temptation is to either give up or go all in. And instead you kind of found this middle ground of letting your body show up. How did you do that? I think it's exactly that almost what you're alluding to is I've, I thought about it almost felt like I was experiencing an athletic death because deep down in my heart, I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be back. So even getting to spin easy on the bike or do the elliptical or do cross training. And I have gratitude for that process. And so I think it's allowing me to take this like more long term focus mindset. And I truly have a lot of joy and gratitude right alongside the competitive mindset of my personality that's like, we must crush bitches now. And I think the two of those are coming together to in the first time in my life actually hit a middle ground and training. And I think that's where my body responds best. I don't think I respond well to be that type of person that's like, I'm all in on training. I think that mindset actually tears my body down. So we've actually gotten emails from podcast listeners. One in particular that went back through your whole Strava. Oh Lord, don't do that. It was going back to like 2016 and when you were winning all those national championships and it's just like, what's the intensity distribution of Megan's training in September 2016? And what I wanted to say is like, not good. It worked really well. And that kind of points out how a lot of these training principles are a little bit more nuanced than we make them out to be. But seeing you fully commit to it now is incredibly exciting. And like, I'm looking here at your body and it is just so cool what you've done. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that baby Leo was staring at me through your womb, you know? You're just like, I don't know, it's such a freaking rock star. It's the coolest. Oh, that means a lot. Well, when I was out there on the bike getting tossed around in the wind, I kind of wished baby Leo was back in my womb. I was like, I need some ballast. We need some hardcore ballast out here. So no, it's been a fun journey and definitely not an easy one. But I think the process of going through it is going to make me a better long term athlete. And I think getting back to your point. So when back in like from, I think from 2013 to 2016, when I was first coming into the trails, I trained so hard. And it was not productive. And now I'm really thinking about intensity distribution in my training. And it's a lot more fun to be in zone one than all the time and be in like zone one to be in zone three and zone four. Yeah. And I think that's been a helpful part is is I, the training is sustainable for me. And I think that's feeding into the enjoyment. It is really fascinating though. As we get to one of the big topics today on double threshold workouts, I think we'll maybe we can even talk about some of your past training and how it might accidentally fall into some of these principles and how the nuanced version, especially of trail training can fit some templates even without necessarily being super structured. So I think you might have secretly been doing some good Norwegian training even as it was awfully hard and got people going back through your Strava six years later. I think the caveat is I was doing Norwegian training every single day. It was like double thresholds every single day to the point where my body was on the razor's edge of adaptation and probably I mean, I was not developing my aerobic system long term. So in some ways, I feel like I'm an aerobic baby. Yeah. At the moment, I have a lot of aerobic gains to be made and I'm excited for that. You know what Taylor Swift would say. Oh, am I a sexy baby? You're the sexiest baby. Okay. We have the best episode for you today. A quick roadmap of it. Quick little thing on mental health, then talking about the best book ever, Lauren Fleischman since a few takeaways we had talking about blood work. I actually got my blood taken. I'm very excited to tell you. High five on that, David. High five. Blackhand in 100k recap and a discussion of shooting your shot via Megan's athlete, Meg Morgan, who got a golden ticket, breaking down two champion workouts, including double thresholds that we're seeing athletes do across, you know, some elite performers. We're going to talk a little bit about the nuances there. A fun business saga with Strava, the company. And that's a little bit different approach than we've taken in the past. I'm kind of curious what the listeners think about their marketing approach here. A follow up to the relationship episode. And then maybe just maybe a question on how to deal with running being impossible sometimes and how to prevent it. I think it's going to be impossible to get to that. Because we have tons of sexy science, tons of I'm sure caveats and anecdotes along the way. Yeah. And I'm also really excited to talk about Strava. In some life, I would love to do a business podcast with you. How would you so fun? We talked about relationships on the last episode and got a lot of great feedback. And it would be fun to dedicate the end of an episode to just business questions. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll work it in another place too when we talk about our ads at Black Canyon because I think we have an interesting approach to business in some ways. That might be a good template for some others in a way that's like you're still trying to uplift people and be weird. But we can get to that in just a second. I'm excited. Okay. So first thing we want to talk about very briefly is that the news that you might have seen that Senator John Federman from Pennsylvania checked himself into the hospital with depression. And this is kind of a new thing where people are open enough with mental health for this to be public information. So we wanted to uplift him and celebrate this journey even as we know it so hard. And also to uplift you and celebrate you for whatever you're going through out there. This is ubiquitous. It's something we see in coaching. It's something we've dealt with even if it hasn't resulted in being this severe. But it's just so important to accept that and understand that those things are what make you special, not necessarily something that is bad about you and certainly nothing to be ashamed about. And I think it's actually important too because I don't know if I've ever seen a politician talk about their own mental health. It's few and far between. And I think that happens so often in other fields too. I think about medicine where like residents or attendings are so hesitant to talk about their own mental health because I think it's entrenched in the culture of the field. But I also think whenever you're in a position of leadership, it can feel like vulnerable and like people are watching you and paying attention to you and it's hard to talk about mental health. But I think the more we do so, it actually is a true sign of leadership. Like I think leadership is being courageous and being vulnerable. And I think this sets an amazing precedent. I mean definitely. I was never open about it when I was really dealing with it. But when I was in law school, very beginning of it, they do this cold calling, Socratic method. I had just heard about it and seen it in movies. In the very first day, I started to have like what I realized now was an anxiety attack. And it subsided but then it kind of persisted for a few weeks. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. My heart was beating above 100 beats from it all the time for someone to rest in a 36. And to imagine that there are people that walk through life like that all the time and don't feel comfortable telling people about it, it's like oh my gosh, we need to open up. And a really cool story that comes from Warren Fleshen's book that won Dimension on this is she was competing in the Diamond League race over in England, which is one of the premier track races in the world. And before the race, she was like, I shouldn't be here. I don't want to be here. A feeling that we can all probably empathize with in some ways. That feeling when you wake up on race morning and aren't so sure. Her coach got her to show up and she goes and she wins that race and monumental achievement. And afterwards she credited him. And this is what Coach Mark Rowland said to her. The best ones are always running away from ghosts love. That's such a beautiful quote. And I think about that often in running and training is I think as athletes and as humans we all have ghosts. And I think it's about the verb in that sense of running away from the ghosts when in reality I think the best thing to do with ghosts is to sit with them, to talk to them, to make friends with them, maybe even dance and sing with them. But I think as athletes it's so easy to run away from them. But I think that becomes harder and harder and harder in the long term. But as I tell athletes it's like how do you harness that momentum and energy to compete when you're making friends with ghosts? And I think that's something that's really challenging. Yeah, you just got to make them into sexy ghosts. Like the Pac-Man ghosts. Those were always very sexy ghosts. Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan. I wonder how many boys in the 1980s masturbated to Pac-Man ghosts. That is strange. It's very strange to say. Are we going to leave that or are we going to leave it in? Let's leave it in. Let's leave it in. I'm sure John Fetterman will be proud of us. So basically you're not alone. Ask for help. We are here. Your friends are here. The more you open up, the more you will be loved. We promise. Okay, now onto Good for a Girl. Lauren Fleschman's book. Our assignment to you is to read it. We talked about it last week. It is incredible. But we just wanted to reflect on that a little bit more because I have been straight vibing with this book on my runs listening to it as an audiobook. It's such a good book. I think it's your first audiobook. You have now, it's going to be really hard to replicate that experience because I don't think any audiobook will touch this. Yeah, it has been life changing. I never really respected audiobooks as much as I should have because Lauren herself is reading it, right? So she's intonating things perfectly. And she's a way better reader than I am in my own head. Like I'm like, oh, that's how you would read that. There's so many times on the run where I'm stopping to write down quotes that she did about random things. I'm like, what a good writer. So I'm now a big fan of audiobooks, especially when they're read by the authors, I think. It's so good. It's the first audiobook that I've listened to under 1.8 speeds. So I listened to most of my stuff at 1.8 speed or higher for Lauren. I'm like, I want to marinate in these words. I want to bask and feel all of their weight and meaning. So she's on 1.2 speed. So you're actually further along in the book than I am because... I'm team 1.5 speed. You're 1.5 speed. I'm like, I need to hear it all. That's really a testament to her. So if you take away from it, the most important one is not playing the power to weight game. We've talked about this a ton on the podcast, but if power, the amount of output you have is in the numerator and weight is in the denominator, which often is something that you're told in sports, it leads you down dark paths because if you play with that denominator, it's going to fuck the numerator and it's just going to ruin your body. So really focus on building your power and finding your strong and try not to play the power to weight game. And I actually appreciate that sentiment because when I came into sport early on, I grasped onto that equation because I was like, I like math, I like science. Equations, I can do this, I can think about it. But if sport were only that equation, I think it would be... It would take the fun away out of sport and the good news is that that equation is a simplistic representation of training of performance and I'm glad for it because otherwise it would just be this easy biohack into an equation that doesn't exist. But truly, I think playing that game creates an inability for athletes to compete in the long term and it's really, really important just to keep harnessing that power and not to think about body weight. This is where we talk about throwing out the scale, not important to track over the long term. Yeah, and what Lauren says is that essentially that power number can increase for decades and so push that number high, high, high and that requires being strong. And the other thing she's talked about a lot is the importance of the process, which a little bit cliché at this point in the sense that everyone talks about it, but if everyone talks about it, it must be real, right? And this is one of the best athletes of all time who's worked with the best athletes of all time too, saying, hey, as soon as you put results on a pedestal, you can get fucked super quickly. And we wrote about that in our book that we released many years ago at this point and I feel like almost every single running book gets backed the idea of process because it's... I mean, it's ubiquitous, but it is the crux of running and you just see it in so many... It costs many different manifestations of it, but I think the more you deviate away from that, the harder running becomes. Yeah, and she had an amazing quote on this talking about the piece she found before one of her big races. Where did that calm come from? I had wondered at the time. Now I knew it was a resolve to execute the plan without attachment to the result. It was valuing guts more than the win. What a good quote, right? Like, guts is where it's at. I love the idea of valuing guts. Also in ultra running often, it's valuing literal guts and figurative guts at the same time too because it's like you got to deal with stomach and plurgence as part of the process. But her reflections on the process, it was kind of like receiving a warm hug because these are all topics. I mean, I think the interesting thing about running is these are the most common narratives in sport, but I think the way that she presents the narratives is it's not something that's unfamiliar to me, but it's receiving a warm hug in the process of talking about it. I also think she's such a fantastic writer that that really goes into it. I mean, I value her courage so much in putting her story out there. She had a quote that you actually flagged, saying, you can't write a memoir if you're afraid to hurt people. And reading it at times, I'm like, oh my gosh, Lauren, I wish I had your ability to put yourself out there and also bring other people with you along that journey. That was one of the main takeaways I had from the book is I'm not going to be writing a memoir about my life. I mean, I don't think people would necessarily want to read a memoir about my life like they would Lawrence. But it's so hard because I think it takes authentically telling stories that don't always cast people in the best of lights to make a point. But I think Lauren comes at it. I think the people that she portrays in the book understand her underlying intentions. And so it goes over well, but damn, I would struggle to write a memoir. Yeah, it's so true. And so as I was finishing my run, there's this chapter called See Is For Courage. And I don't want to spoil it because it is a really great part of the book. But as you're going through it in reading, I think you're going to cry just like I did. So I'm running down our road, crying my eyes out with joy and life affirmation from her telling her story. And that's like the coolest thing that she shared that with the world. So please buy it. I think it's going to be assigned reading for all of our athletes because I think it describes a lot of what we're trying to get to on this podcast in a way that's like absolute punch in the face with like brilliance. And I absolutely enjoy it so much. Okay. So hopefully your heart rate is not going to work for you as I co-call you. Was there any part of the book that you felt like hit home for you in terms of your own personal experience of running? I think her experience in high school in particular. So you know, she had people along the journey that were telling her certain things and she thought certain things about her body even when she was really young, especially at Fot Locker Nationals. So she went to the race that has all the high school superstars and even then she could tell some people were mortgaging their future and that she wanted to represent something more. And I didn't have that in high school. I didn't have the mentors she had or the self-awareness that she had. And so when I was running, I guess it was in middle school. So like six or seventh grade, a guy with a whistle came up to me after a little 5k in Delaware. And you know he's official because he got a whistle. He must have been a big deal. You should take whatever advice is coming. Exactly. But that's what I thought, right? This old guy that had clearly done it before an understobe is talking about said you have a lot of potential. This is how much you need to weigh. And he did an equation based on my weight and my height. And I tried to pursue that. And in retrospect, that was an eating disorder. But done in a way that I thought I was trying to improve my body, which is how a lot of them start. And like two months later, I had gotten down to the weight that he said. I also had almost no hair on my head. It's been all falling out. And I didn't really run again for six years after that. I got into other sports because I burned out from running. Thank God in retrospect. And I was able to come back to running as an adult that understood these issues a little bit more. But like that's the part that resonates with me because I'm like, dude, I was at risk of being one of those people that mortgages their future. And I just got lucky that I didn't do the sport long enough for that to happen. Well, I'm so glad you stumbled into that luck because I mean, I think if you had stuck stuck with running, I think it would have been really hard to hit this point where you're at long term. I'm also really glad that you have burgers in your life because your hair has grown back beautifully. Thank you. I've described it on the podcast before. We call your hair. It kind of looks like you have pubes on your head. Yeah. I mean that in the best way. You're a beautiful human. We uplift all bushes. All bushes matter, Megan. I get that. Okay. So flipping it back on you though, was there any part in the book so far that you haven't finished quite yet? I don't think that has resonated with you in particular. I think just getting back to the element of patience. Like I think it has helped to reinforce the notion of patience for myself as I come back postpartum. But I think for me postpartum, you're consistently getting weighed in the pregnancy process. Yeah. And then I go up as it should. And for me actually it was a manifestation of health. I was like, Leo's growing inside there. This is good. I'm gaining weight. Mostly a little bit of a mind fuck, you know, because you're like, I need this weight to go up and up and up and up. Yeah. And when it's like sometimes as young people, we might get different associations with the scale. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was challenging at times. But I think I just was embracing the idea that this is a season of life. Yeah. And in the season of life, I am creating life. And that's kind of a cool thing. That needs to be like a poster on the wall with like a woman drinking a glass of wine or something. It should just be every once in a while, I would stand in the shower. And for the first time in my life, I had this like, I had big boobs and like a big bump. And I was like, look at that shadow. Girl, what's going on in that shadow has like transformed now. But I think the nice thing about like the postpartum period is you go to the doctor once at the six week follow up and then you don't see the OB gun again for a year. So I haven't been weighed. And I think it's been really nice just to let go of that. And I actually, I don't weigh myself and I haven't weighed myself consistently for like 10 or 15 years, but it's really nice not to chart and follow that. And just to be patient with this like season of life that my body is in. And actually sometimes I miss being pregnant because it's like, it was a totally different you know, body and season of life. And I think I appreciate that. Well, your boobs are still really big. They are. That helps at all. It's a big old honkers. Oh yeah, big honkers. It's a, it's a new acclimation to run by them. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting though, when they go away after you stop breastfeeding. I think I'm going to miss them. You're going to miss them? Yeah. I miss breastfeeding. I'm going to miss like the time. It's, it's really quality time spent with Leo as weird as that sounds, but I'm also going to miss him too. It's, we weren't laying in bed the other night. And I was like, David, this is the first time you're going to have boobs and abs at the same time. Yes. A season in life as they say, your body is perfect all the time every, in every which way. So actually a study that came out last week that's relevant to finish off this discussion is called fueling the female athlete. And it was an audit study. They looked at every past review out there guiding carbohydrate intake for athletes. It found 937 studies with 11,202 participants and of those participants, only 11% were women. And I think when we break down the representation of the studies, it's also interesting too. So most of the studies were done in male only cohorts. So 74% of the studies were done in male only cohorts. Only 4% of the studies were done in female only cohorts, which is really small and then even smaller. So only 2% of the studies had some sort of methodological design where they're looking at sex differences in carbohydrates and how carbohydrates are utilized. So those numbers are like, that's a stark representation. And I think it goes to show that for female athletes, a lot of what we're relying on is the combination of like anecdotal evidence and murky scientific evidence that we're still weaving into sport. Yeah. And so I got to be so careful about how science is applied to people because like, what relevance is it when testosterone plays such a big role in estrogen, sex hormones and endocrine system matter so much to have these studies based on men at all. And so, you know, as we talk about all these issues, remember that broader context, remember there's a long way to go. And remember that Lauren's message is not just about women and girls and, you know, non-binary people and transgender people that fall within that spectrum. It's about everyone and thinking about our bodies in a holistic way. And most of all, trying to work to a place where we truly love our bodies and everything they do for us, whether we got big honkers or not. Well, I think in some sense that the landscape for male athletes who are struggling with body image or struggling with eating can actually be harder because although there's limited research on female athletes across like the scientific landscape, there's very limited like discussions and conversations surrounding like male body issues. Definitely. And so I think this book is a hug for anyone on the gender spectrum. Yeah. It's the best. And I think it's a good one to the most exciting news of all time for me personally. I got my blood taken after many years of having a phobia. And so I want to give me a big hug and a big high five. I'm so proud of you. Haven't you? So our little guy Leo has had his blood test done more than you at this point in life and you're 34. How did you, I mean, I have various phobias of things in life. I'm just curious. How did you work through this phobia? Okay. So what happened is we were talking about I have a hemochromatosis gene variant, just one of them. So I don't have the full condition. But that could make me at risk for storing a lot of iron in my body. And so when I mentioned that on the podcast, we had three different listeners email in. I need to get my blood taken immediately because it's possible that my fairs in was like 800 or something, a level that would be destroying my internal organs. And I realized that that plane is like, okay, whatever like concerns I have about having someone stick a needle into my arm, which is still pretty rough for me. And I'm like, I need to overcome it because I could be killing myself by not getting that information. So I think you to the podcast listeners, because I've been harping on you for years to get your blood work tested. And I think you kind of file it right alongside my harping on you to go to the dentist, other various things in life. You're like, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that. But then when these podcast listeners email you, you're like, I'm booking an appointment tomorrow. Well, I'm just telling every single person listening right now, I am not going to the dentist. No matter what you say, I don't care what you say about plaque in my veins and arteries. I am not going to the dentist, but I do brush my teeth, which is a plus. I support myself there. You do have beautiful teeth, but only for so long. We will see how long this lasts. I don't know if I have beautiful teeth. I have like four teeth that kind of are pointing towards Kansas at any given moment. No matter where I am, they're much like a compass. They just kind of are so jagged that they move along in that direction, but I've made the best with it. I got you. I think beauty lies in the imperfection, David. It truly does. But how did you, I mean, did you tell the person that you were afraid of getting your blood drawn? No, no, God, no. I just told her it was like one of my first times and she treated me very gently. Much like losing your virginity or something. Okay, so actually very interesting results and we'll try to broaden this out so that it applies to everyone. My ferritin, the number I was worried about, was actually 26, which is quite low and would probably be hurting performance. In the meantime, my hemoglobin was 16.9, which is very high and my hematocrit was 49.9, which is also very high. So even though I had low iron numbers for the most part, my red blood cell numbers were through the roof. What this should mean is that once I am able to increase some of my iron levels by supplementing, I'm going to get so much stronger. I'm like, this blood work might actually unleash the beast within me. I'm so pumped. Which is wild. You're a little bitch, man. Your hemoglobin levels are so much higher than mine. Wait on the bitch because of my high hemoglobin levels? Yeah, it's just genetic and actually it's not, I mean, there's a significant part of it. We actually talked about improving hemoglobin mass. But as we've seen, like your family has a genetic predisposition for high hemoglobin levels and I'm like, oh man, but at least Leo potentially gets those genes. Every time we go above like 12,000 feet of elevation, I'm wobbling. I feel like I'm out at sea again and you're just like sending it and so it made me feel slightly validated too. It's actually an interesting reflection on talent because my dad was a semi-professional cyclist when I was growing up. So we always assumed that endurance came from him, right? But my mom has had her blood taken a few times recently and she has almost identical blood work. So in fact, my aerobic capacity might actually be coming from my mom. And I think it points out that we don't actually know what our talents are often and you just kind of got to put yourself out there. And the reason we love talking about monitoring things and doing training interventions is because often you can uncover talents. You don't even realize you have. So that was really interesting. There's the study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that found that iron treatment improves aerobic performance in people with low ferritin, even if their red blood cell numbers are good. So can probably expect that. That'll be really cool. So you must be so excited to start supplementing with iron head. Yes, I'm so bummed. And given how prone you are to the placebo effect, I feel like in four days you're going to be like, I'm better. My ferritin levels are higher. I think I already feel good. Look at me right now. Do you see my veins just popping out? Oh, they're so beautiful. That's placebo veins because I've started taking iron. I'm really, really, really excited. Actually, I think it's because I cold cold on you. Your veins are like, we need to pop out now. But so ferritin, so your ferritin is 26, which is low. Typically we say ferritin that's optimized somewhere above 40 to 50 depends on where you look in the scientific research. But you do have a ways to go, which I consider to be exciting because I think once you have that's optimized, you're going to be even stronger at high altitudes and in general performance too. I'm so excited. Also, some of my inflammation markers were high. My AST was high, which talks about different levels of inflammation in your body. My CK was high, both of which are not totally uncommon for an athlete, but something that I need to monitor a little bit and how hard I am training. And I think your blood work is actually an interesting reflection in the idea that if a primary care provider, primary care doctor saw your blood work, it'd probably be like, oh, something's a little weird on here, we should do follow up testing. But I think as high level athletes, we often have abnormalities in our blood work that can be a reflection of just high level training and being a specimen like you are. And that's totally okay. I think AST is actually, so AST is a liver enzyme and that's what for you was slightly high. So AST is aspartate immunotransferate, it's a liver enzyme. But a lot of primary care providers don't know that AST actually comes from many different sources in the body, so it originates in the liver, the skeletal muscle, the cardiac muscle, the red blood cells, and many other different organs. But as a result, your hard training is probably elevating your AST, but if a primary care provider saw that, they'd be like, what's wrong with your liver? Yeah, you actually shared a really fascinating study with me that just came out. And I'm not actually not sure what your notes in, but essentially said that highest AST levels can be common in athletes and not be any concern at all. Especially when you see them side by side with elevated creatine kinase, which is a marker of muscle breakdown. Yeah, and so our big message here is, if I bit the bullet, you guys can bite the bullet to you. I got this test done through Inside Tracker, which is great. The Choline Flanagan panel is awesome. You can also get this done through Quest or whatever. It is so helpful. And for me, it's like a little bit of supplementation. It might cause a huge difference. So I added iron biscuisinate to my routine, which we are big fans of. I used the Thorne brand. I added vitamin D drops. And I should have just taken them all along. I got this from Athletic Greens, which comes if you use our code. And I wasn't even using it. What's wrong with me? I had it right here, Megan. Athletic Greens. You should have done it. I think your vitamin D is going to elevate. You're going to be feeling good and groovy. Athletic Greens, I believe in them so hard that anyone that comes to our house, I just give one at the travel pack. Athletic Greens, I'm like, here, try this and fill your energy levels in one day. And usually we get people hooked. Yeah, you know how the Oscars, they give gift bags? All are just Athletic Greens. We should start giving that out in Halloween, actually, in like little... I like that. That's right. Yeah, give it when kids come to the door. Yeah, Snickers, Bardon, Athletic Greens. We're going to be written about in like Fox News or something poisoning the next generation. So athleticreens.com slash swap SWAP SWAP, which is really interesting, is Athletic Greens, the powder itself, doesn't have vitamin D or iron. And those were my two metrics that were not great. So everything Athletic Greens touched turned to gold. The things that I needed to supplement with on top of that. And if you use our code, you get vitamin D drops, which I should have been taking all along and I will be taking now. Next thing I added was Tumorak to help with inflammation, which was a recommendation from Inside Tracker. And then maybe the one that, you know, again, I need to practice what I preach is I'm adding protein to my diet. So my sex hormone binding globulin was high, which means that even though my free testosterone was good, or my regular testosterone was good, I don't have as much free testosterone as I perhaps could. The main thing in studies that that finds is you might be a little bit low on protein. So as always, just needed to add one extra protein scope in the afternoon and I'm going to be back to it now. We had a prediction contest heading into your blood results and you won because I predicted that your hemoglobin was going to be lower. I saw these results and I was like, dude, that's high. But I predicted that your testosterone was going to be sky high, which you should be honored about. But you do have a slightly, a little bit of work to do on your free testosterone. It didn't, it didn't look bad, but it could be optimized a little bit more. So it was fun to have the prediction contest going on. That's what she said. Okay, so blood test suggestions really quickly. Make sure you get your ferrets in tested, your iron tested, your B12, your vitamin D. And those are the big four. Also consider your testosterone, which could help too. Then in such our test cortisol as well, I think cortisol sometimes is, it's a spot marker of stress. So sometimes it's hard to test when you only have one measurement. It can be helpful to trend over the baseline. And then for female athletes, female athlete specific hormones can be challenging to kind of parse out what's what in the context of a menstrual cycle or, or perimenopause or postmenopause. And so I think if you are thinking about that, work with a specialized provider on that and they can give you specific feedback as to where you are. Hormonely. Yeah. And go back and listen to our hemoglobin mass episode too, which could give you some ideas of how to, you know, get these numbers up a little bit. Okay. So onto the Black Canyon. This is incredibly exciting because if you watch the coverage of the 100k, which is going to get raised to Western States, you heard our advertisements, which were a little bit cringe, but we heard one of them and we had to leave the room because we actually went to separate rooms. Yeah. I don't know why that was, but it was like, we just had to sit there in peace for a second and not look at each other as they were being read. Megan, if someone throws a grenade into your foxhole, you just go whichever direction feels right. You just don't stay there. And that's what it felt to us is like these were both cringing. But what I think happened is that they were so cringe and so earnest that by the end they got funny again because we were so committed to the bit. That's what I like to tell myself. Well, I've gone in a cyclical cycle of believing in them and not believing in them. And at the end of the day, after nine hours of coverage, I was like, you know what? We needed something to spice up nine. I mean, the people did great covering it. Yeah. Leah was amazing in the field and the announcers were great, but you got to spice it up sometimes. Can I read one of them? Yes. Okay. So I'm not sure why these involved astronomy, but they did. Oh, we love astronomy. We love astronomy. We've been to the planetarium way too many times. We've seen all the kids shows at the planetarium before we even had kids. Well, I guess this means we can write off the planetarium on our taxes now. Oh, yeah. That's totally worth it. Okay. Here's the first one. The Drake equation is a theoretical concept to calculate the number of advanced civilizations in the universe. There are 160 billion planets in our galaxy alone and probably around 200 billion galaxies in the universe. Using those numbers and assuming life is not a one off mistake, the Drake equation indicates that there are likely millions of advanced civilizations out there. And across all of those civilizations, scientists are certain that there is no creature that can cover 100 miles faster than Jim Walks. Our assignment to you, remember that our time on Earth is short and you should unapologetically take up space with your voice and your spirit. Huzzah. Okay. That was great. I copied you. I'm really proud of you. We also should have worked wind into astronomy and wind pelting ancient civilizations and just see what happened. That's true. Can't be wind in space though. Oh, true. No particles. So pretty proud of that. You drop in astronomy because of my ass. But then the very last one was essentially saying that life is short, universe is massive, let's support love and inclusion. So trying to ground it in some sort of broader meaning. I don't know if that fully got across, but I don't know. I think that if anything else, people notice them, which is good for marketing perhaps. Oh yeah. Marketing, oh wait, you got to be weird and different and set yourself out there. And I think we did that in the context of a nine hour livestream. Well speaking of putting yourself out there, please subscribe to the podcast, give it five stars and click follow, particularly on Apple Podcasts, which really helps us out. And you'll get more great astronomy facts if you do that in the future. It does. Now whenever I listen to just like one podcast I've posted from someone, I'm like five stars. It deserves that love. And give them that follow. It really helps other people find it. So Megan, I want to give you big props. You give me props as a coach to start this episode. And I want to say you're the best freaking coach in the world objectively. I'm so proud of you for what you've done. And I'm so proud of your athlete, Megan Morgan, who got the golden ticket at Black Canyon. And despite not being chosen that high. And I think people just didn't know what they were looking at because you told me that she was getting to get it. And I was like, you're always right on this. So I can't wait. But yeah, it's amazing. I called it and I'm going to borrow your sentiment that you said earlier on in the episode that talent is a mother. Meg is so talented and I'm lucky just to be along for the journey with her. But it was, I think her journey in the sport is so beautiful because I talked to her on Thursday before the race and she had, we had a long talk about mindset and strategy and things like that. And one thing that she told to me that I thought was really special was that she wanted this golden ticket so badly that she was scared. I'm going to talk through those emotions and what it meant. But I was proud of her because I think sometimes it's easier to play it cool and be like, oh, you know, I'm not going to know if I don't know if I'm going to take it. I don't know if I want this. And seeing how much she wanted it and how much she portrayed it and worked through it and worked through her just kind of nervousness associated with that. I was so proud of her as an athlete. Watching this live feed, I was crying. I was crying my eyes. I was watching her come from fourth place, taking the podium and she just raised so beautifully. And it was a fun reflection, like coaching is a fun job. I thought it was about our ads and then I saw it was about the job, live updating. So I think this is the big gospel of shooting your shot. So Meg's journey doesn't start now. She's done golden ticket races in the past and not gotten a ticket. She's worked her ass off. She's kept putting herself out there. And every time she has quote unquote failed or not achieved perhaps the pinnacle of what shooting your shot can lead to, she's used that as motivation and rededication. And I think that's the magic of her story, is giving yourself a chance and not getting down on yourself when that chance doesn't happen. Because all of this stuff is pretty low probability. Even that race for Meg, I'm sure if we ran that race 100 times, it's not as she would get 100 golden tickets. And it's like, what's the difference in those days, the great day and maybe the less great day, it's like, oh, random chance. And I think her ability to learn and recalibrate and adjust on the macro cycle, as you were describing about like, you know, between these races is really impressive. But it also fed into like the micro element of her racing too, because she went out so fast. I actually, we got this first split in her and I was like, oh, damn it. I remember texting Leah, who was a correspondent on course, just a bunch of the like, pray emoji. So I was like, we're going to see what happens. But Meg dialed it back. She recognized she went out too fast and she dialed it back. But it takes a lot of confidence as an athlete to be able to dial it back and keep that motivation going. So she bounced back to like seventh or eighth place intentionally and then worked her way up all the way up to third from that. And I thought it was just it represented like what she's been going through on a broader process within the process of a race. That's so cool. You also mentioned to me something about caffeine with her. Oh, yeah. Well, so she had her first coffee, like a couple days before the race and on the phone, she was like, Megan, should I do caffeine during the race? Wait, so you're saying first coffee ever whole life? For a whole, I mean, I don't know. I think I'm pretty sure of her whole life, but certainly before her running. Yeah. It was the first time that she's ever had caffeine and before Blackhand and she sent me a picture of a bunch of gels and one of them was a 70 milligram caffeage gel. She's like, should I take this? And I was like, Meg, you're going to go into orbit if you take that. So that was my running joke with her is that she just went into orbit in the race. She she definitely reached escape velocity. That's pretty amazing. Any other takeaways from her journey that really stood out to you? I think for me, just the idea of just continuously putting yourself out there and believing in I think along the process of that, she also recognized that she was learning to. So like, you know, she had stomach issues and some of her previous hundred Ks and she's just like, you know, I'm learning as an athlete. I believe in myself. I believe in my talent and I certainly do as well. And it was just amazing to see the culmination of all of that coming together and it made me cry so hard. I love it so much. So coming adversity is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, exactly. Kind of like what you dealt with last summer. And I think it's all about stories too. Like, I don't think Meg would have appreciated this so much. If she hadn't had some of the learning experiences in her previous hundred Ks and she just has, I'm excited for her Western States. I'm so, so excited to see what she does. But also too, you know, that's going to be a learning day for her too. Yeah. And I mean, that's the story of, you know, these types of races is there's some incredible results. And then also, even for athletes, we coach, there's some really tough days and that's just the way sports work. And so let's get to some more Black Canyon 100K thoughts. And the, there were course records for both men and women. People are going so fast. This kind of goes back on what we talked about last week about how the sport is going to progress by leaps and bounds every year. Like as amazing as these records are, I bet they're going down, you know, consistently in the future, including by the athletes that set them this year. Like they're just going to get better and better and better. It's pretty wild to think about. And I think it's this new frontier of how we go about and approach ultra. It's because before, I think it was this like very patient approach of like, you know, we're just making love to the mountains out there. And Killian, of course, that's where that phrase come from. Killian can run really fast and make love to the mountains at the same time. But now we're going out and just sending it from the gun. And there was a fascinating stat that I saw on Twitter heading into Black Canyon that said at mile 20, so whoever was in the top six at mile 20, the top two at the end of the race always came from, always came from that. So you had to be in the top six at mile 20 to make the top two in previous iterations of that race. And I think we're only going to see that more and more in ultra running is we're going out fast. We're going out hard. We're pushing the limits. And in order to reach the podium, you kind of have to play by that too. Yeah. And the old days they said, you know, you need a lot of foreplay before you. But now they're just like, you go straight to making up. No foreplay allowed. So huge congrats to Killian and Jure and Anthony Costalas, both of whom set course records. Tom Evans and Heather Jackson were both in second. Absolutely stellar athletes. Remarkable. And it just shows how much aggressiveness is required. And the type of training to back that up really requires that ultra athletes don't train like they used to. Like that's the big takeaway I have is like every ultra athlete that wants to compete at that type of level can't just go out into the mountains and jog around a little bit. They need to think about what optimizes aerobic physiology. Much like what we're talking about with road and track runners, it's just being extended now over a longer distance. And I think we're going to, we're starting to see it now at 100 K. I think soon enough we'll start to see it at 100 miles. And it's just an incredibly cool time for coaches and athletes and, you know, fans of the sport. And I think the nature of being an ultra runner too is that you're going to face adversity at some point in your career. So Kili had to drop at Western State last year, do an ankle injury. Anthony Costalas, I think got dropped by his sponsor last year. And now he's back winning Black Canyon 100 K. And I think it just goes to show that as an ultra runner, you're putting yourself out there enough that like, you're going to have failures, you're going to have DNS, you're going to have injuries. And it's about weathering that storm and learning from it. And you know, I think as a coach, it's actually a lot like being an athlete where we have athletes that have good days, we have athletes that have bad days. And it's like this mixed bag of emotions that we sort through and sift through every single race. Definitely. I mean, when you have to go for it, like in all senses, you're sending yourself up for failures, right? Shooting your shot means you're going to miss lots of shots. And that's why we try to celebrate missing your shots just as much as making them. Yeah. In this context, two other training notes that I think are important for everyone. We talk about heat adaptation a lot on here in like year round heat adaptation, independent of performance and heat. This race showed it yet again. Like the athletes that are heat adapted have an advantage. So something to just consider doing throughout your life, like two times a week of this, whether it's hot tub, hot bath, sauna, it can be so helpful. And it wasn't actually that hot out there. Yeah. And the grand scheme of things, especially when you compare it to a race like Western States. And I think it was, we were looking at the live, the live feed. It was like 67 degrees out there, but the sun, the nature of it. And what we've seen in studies is that it doesn't take a lot of heat for things to start impacting performance. So what I was saying to all my athletes is like, stay wet. Let's do sauna. Let's do all of these different things heading into the race to make sure we're ready for it, even though it's not going to be objectively that hot. Basically if your race is over 60 degrees, treat it like it's Western States in terms of your pulling mechanisms. It's a lot to think about these. Even if your heart rate just goes up two or three beats per minute, if you're on the razor's edge, that's going to be enough to cause you to bonk. And so that really matters. Number two is hydration. We don't talk about hydration that much on here because the science is so individual, like so much more even than nutrition. But it is so important. Like the athletes that we coached and that we've seen out there that had tough days, often we're peeing Coca Cola at 50K. And so understanding your hydration needs really, really important. I know it's one of the most important things for me personally. And the scientific field is actually pretty polarized on hydration. I think it's almost like walking into a political battle between between two different sides because on one side you have this, it's like the waterlog side that says only drink to thirst. Then on the other side you have, you know, these are the hydration principles that are really important and it's quite a bit of hydration. And how do you navigate that like through anecdotal evidence or scientific evidence? And what we tell athletes is always err on the side of caution. Definitely. Like I think for me as an athlete, know yourself, I can't drink to thirst because I don't get thirsty. So I got to follow like drinking parameters. You're just too focused. Yeah, right? I'm too busy to get thirsty. Too busy to get thirsty. That's so perfect. Yeah. And I mean, it really matters. Like this is a high stakes game, not just for performance. A study just came out and wilderness and environmental medicine on four cases of acute kidney injury after Western states. And essentially they were all hydration issues. So yes, there is the concern of over hydration, which is why we suggest always hydrating with sports drink during these activities because that limits your opportunity because over hydration is a dilution of sodium in the body. And so if you're keeping sodium coming, you should be okay. But it's complicated because on the flip side, dehydration can get you to the hospital and for some of these athletes, they're on dialysis. Actually, this case study, all four of the athletes with acute kidney injury were on dialysis for at least an extended period of time. Yeah. I mean, and they're recovering. Most of the athletes are back racing again, but you do not want to play around with acute kidney injury on multiple different time points for your long term health and kidney health question. I'm going to put you on the spot again. Oh, yeah. One more cold call. And athlete over hydrate when they've had sports mix or sports drink in their bottle. I haven't seen it with an athlete that we coach. I'm sure there are stories out there. So it would take a lot of drinking to do that. Like in a way that might make the GI system rebel before electrolyte status. Also, imagine it has to be cold, you know, could be like one of these hot dry days that they're seeing. That's a good question. Have you seen it? I haven't. And that's why I was curious. You know, we gather a lot of data and swap and I haven't seen it. So basically, all the training principles we talk about, they're debatable to a certain extent. I think heat adaptation and focusing on your own personal hydration needs are basically a universal thing that we don't talk about enough. Like one of the weird data points in swap that we've seen is that some of the best performers in the world have freakishly low sweat rates. Yep. So the hydration element is less dialed for them because it doesn't need to be that dialed because they can just go out and drink, I don't know, 12 or 16 ounces an hour and be fine. And so especially if you have higher sweat rates, pay more attention to it and experiment, but making sure you don't over hydrate because that can also put you in the hospital. It's a really tough point. Also the symptoms of over hydration and under hydration often come to the same thing. It always, it always manifests in like dizziness and GI issues. So it's really hard to know, but I think treat yourself as your own and of one and also to don't take sweat tests. Yeah. Sweat tests when you applied into the field, we've talked about this before are very challenging to extrapolate because oftentimes when you're in a lab, different conditions than when you're out in an ultra. Yeah. So just make sure that you adjust your sweat test results. They're great to do, but adjust them for what you're going to be facing in the real world. Like if you're going to be going harder or if it's going to be hotter, make sure you're paying attention to that. Okay. Two workouts of the pros. I'm so excited about this because I think it's really topical right now. And the first one is the biggest sexiest pro workout of all, double thresholds. I've heard it be referred to as double T, which sounds like it could be the title of a really fun rap song that we should concoct at some point. It would be fun. Yeah, I love it. I'm just surprised that it's called double T because like I always just thought like it was double L T like lactate threshold. Yeah, that's true. And all of a sudden people are using different terminology. I hate when this happens to me. It's like I'm on the cutting edge and then all of a sudden people are just saying different things. It's much like the term we use fatigue resistance. Yep. Fatigue resistance in the literature is now called durability. I'm confused by that one. I think it probably originated from somewhere where English was their second language. Because I feel like in French it's durability. And it sounds the same thing, but I think the translation might have gotten lost. It's peavy. A lot of exercise science actually exercises physiology. Some of the key studies come from abroad. So I could see this being some sort of like I don't know some French or Swedish term that gets translated. I like how you're trying to use etymology to make me feel better about myself and how I feel a little bit behind sometimes. Because you know we talk about fatigue resistance, but you can also search durability to find those terms. Yeah. So exercise physiology there's like five different terms always for the same meaning. It's a little bit confusing. Yeah. Yeah. Much like tempo running. And that's what this gets to is a type of tempo running and how you use tempo intervals. So I think the reason that everyone's talking about it yet again is Woody Concade, an American runner, ran a 1251 5K indoors. And he did this after moving away from the Bowerman Track Club for training, training with some of Mike Smith's athletes in Arizona who do a lot of double threshold work. So it's shining a light on it in the US. This has been a staple in Norway as we talked about for quite a while. You're starting to see athletes post about it online. I saw Adley Keefer posted an Instagram of her first double threshold workout. Oh, fascinating. So I think it's starting to percolate a little bit that everyone is experimenting with this a bit. And so I think it's important to talk about again because like when should athletes experiment with it, how can we do it in a safe way? I agree. And Dr. Bakken, who is an exercise physiologist, he's one of the leading exercise physiologists in the field, has actually talked about this for a long time. And it's field tested. But I would say have double thresholds been like probably lab tested at this point? No. So there's no like study that says this is why it works. Though in fact, a study came out just this morning as we're recording this that talks about how lactate controlled training, including these blocks might work. But it's all theoretical. And we might talk about that in a future episode. I didn't have a chance to like really break it down yet. But essentially it talks about things like, you know, calcium pathways and protein signaling and just like preventing your body from breaking down. And I think back in his experiments on himself might be some of the best that we have. So he did three different interventions. The first one involved seven to 10 days of controlled threshold sessions in a row. That's a lot. Can you imagine doing seven? And the thing to think about though is that threshold to me sounds daunting. Yeah. But the word is way more daunting than the workouts often tend to be. So you can do controlled threshold workouts and I can see stacking those. I mean, it's a lot. Stack those over seven to 10 days. But it's a lot more controlled than I think athletes envisioned when they hear the word threshold. Yeah. And for listeners, it's like one hour effort. So, you know, imagine you're racing an hour. That's kind of what we're talking about with threshold. They guide it with lactate measurements, which are much more exact and might be different things for them. But that gives you a baseline for what it is. That was intervention one. Intervention two involved a ton of threshold work in a single session. So we're talking like 80 minutes. So imagine 10 by eight minutes at threshold pace effort, which is hard. And then intervention three is the one we're talking about today blocking the threshold work into a two a day approach. And sometimes they'll do two or three of those a week. And for him, intervention three, one in a landslide. That was massively the most of the best physiological responses he's gotten. That's been applied in Norway for many years. And we've seen some of the world champion athletes come from that. And why do you think this is? Because as we're talking about, this is an area where there's not a ton of scientific research, like our quantity of anecdotal research or anecdotal examples are much higher at this point than the scientific research. Why do you think it is that stacking these efforts into two different sessions within a single day is better than stacking them over multiple days or stacking them into one bigger session? I think for me, it comes back. I'm doing the thing. I'm asking you a question and I'm answering it. But you want to answer it. I feel like you can man's plane because you're such a better background in the field. Okay, I'm going to tell you about there. And I'll see if you agree. So I think it gets the idea that when you're breaking it into two sessions, you can still have pretty high musculoskeletal output across those two sessions because you're refueling, you're recovering between the two of those, where if you stack those across multiple days or within a single session, you might see decay in the output that you're able to put out at the same lactate numbers. Yeah. And so you're getting better bang for your buck plus protein expression genetics, epigenetics, like each and other thousand variables that are not yet studied. You know what? I don't agree with you because I think it's all about magic. I started to panic there for a second. Look, do we not agree? No, you're, I think you're right. I think it all comes down to mechanical output. Yeah. The cellular level explanations are helpful, but in reality, we're kind of guessing there. Yeah. I think in reality, it's like if you do an 80 minute session, you're of course going to have to back off your effort by the end just to finish it. If you do these two days, like clearly they, some athletes are able to keep it up. But interestingly, the athletes that have been able to keep it up are male athletes, for the most part. So will this work for female athletes for them to be able to keep it up? Yeah. I'm going to tag that joke, but you know what? I'm going to sound like a, yeah. Yeah. S.X. Chris freak in the process. I'm not going to. I love it so much. And so the training context of these that are really important to think about, I think, are Canova blocks. So in contrast, Renato Canova, who coached many of the best cadmians and still does, does two a day workouts occasionally, but he'll just do like, let's say three in a whole training block. These are much, much harder. So whereas the Norwegian double workouts might look like five by six minutes in the AM at a low lactate, so like a very controlled effort, like maybe half marathon effort in the PM 25 by 400 at a little bit higher lactate, but similarly very controlled effort. And the Canova examples might look like this. Here's the one from Nate Jenkins that he wrote about in his blog in the AM, two by 10k with the first one at marathon, the second one hard. Whoa. In the PM, a 10k at marathon followed by 10 by 1k at 10k pace. That is fucking impossible. I would never give that as a coach, would you? Oh my God. No. So Nate Jenkins talk about, so Nate Jenkins, one of my working class runner heroes when I first got into it. I read his post on this initially in the mid 2000s. And his quote was this on the session. The damage I had wrought on my body had pushed me to a state where I could not settle into a sleep. I lay there. I had cramps. I shuffled to the bathroom. I was dehydrated. I was exhausted. I was wrecked. I knew after an hour or two that no real sleep would happen, but I had no desire to get out of bed. I would simply lay there in my misery and hope to feel somewhat closer to human when the sun came up. It would take a while, but I would recover. I would however not be the same. A new athlete had been born. My will for the long war had been hardened and my endurance had reached new levels. I would find out in my marathon debut that one great session like this alone was not enough to really finish a marathon box perfectly, but it was enough that I do feel this was the turning point of when I went from a guy who had potential to run a good marathon to a marathoner. That's a beautiful piece of writing. It's a little bit harrowing though because Nate Jenkins, he really maximized his potential. It's amazing what he accomplished. He went to a 214 marathoner. No one would have predicted that. Yeah, based off of his previous training history. I think the challenge is that he had neuromuscular challenges in his legs that were indicative of overtraining. Lots of coordination. Lots of coordination. I think this, like the Kanovo block I would never give to an athlete. It's way too much. I think Nate was trying to hack his physiology in a way that worked in the short time. That was his intention plus get an interesting science experiment, but I would not cosign that in the long term. Yeah, and I think the point is if you're going to do it, do it more controlled than that. You shouldn't be dying in your bed. Yeah. That's a little different. I think there is a place though for doing two workouts in a day. The question is how do you thread the needle? The Norwegian approach of the controlled double threshold sessions that we're talking about shouldn't cause too much breakdown in your body. The problem is if you're not taking constant lactate measurements, it's so easy to push these hard. Then you become doing a lot more like what Nate did, which is fine if you're just doing a couple of them. If you do a lot of them, you start to stack up stress in a way that can be really negative. What we've decided to do is generally not give these. When we do with double thresholds, we try to really figure out ways to control effort, even if it means not structuring them as traditional workouts, which I think gets back a little bit to your training that you did all those years ago. You weren't necessarily doing intervals. You would get your threshold on hills. In that help to maybe get some of these adaptations, particularly at the cellular level, to channel the magic. We've manifested this magic feeling in coaching in a secretive way. When I give these workouts to athletes, I never phrase it as double threshold because I don't let that go through their head about a specific effort they want to hit or just thinking about the lactate measurements. How I give this to a lot of my trial athletes, I actually give this in different ways depending upon the athlete. One of the primary manifestations of this is I give uphill treadmill sessions as a double. A 30-minute uphill treadmill at 15%, working from easy to moderate. That's how I describe it. It winds up being this different iteration of double threshold, but in a controlled way that hopefully helps prevent injuries. You said Megan did uphill treadmills occasionally, right? Meg Morgan, yes. Which is really fascinating. I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Because athletes are controlling their efforts so much better than they do on intervals. If you're not doing lactate measurements, it's so hard. Basic principle, I would say, is if you're going to experiment with these 15 to 30 minutes of threshold work in the AM and the PM, ideally on the low end to start, make sure you're already adapted to doubles. The PM, as Megan said, uphill treadmill, could it even be done on cross-training perhaps? I think so. Maybe. It's hard to say because I think some of the benefits from this are the musculoskeletal and biomechanical outputs. You don't quite get that cross-training. But Gwen Jorgensen, actually an interesting example. As a Gwen Jorgensen Olympic gold medalist in the triathlon, and some of her best running came when she was a triathlete. I think she would agree with the sentiment that I think her running was less strong when she stepped away from the triathlon field. I think she really thrived off of having the... She's probably getting double threshold stimulus in her cross-training for triathlon. Definitely. All the time. Triathletes probably do that consistent amount in general. Just only do this if you're really healthy. You do doubles already. You go to intensity control. That's where the uphill treadmill comes in. I think this might explain why we've seen athletes excel on that so much. I think it's a great option. You can also probably do it on the elliptical or the bike. If you're going to do it on flat intervals, really take a heaping dollop of patience into that workout. Go slow. Make sure you experiment with one every other week to start. Then maybe do them a little bit more consistently. Also, the question is, will this work for women at all? We don't know yet because the number of women that have done it successfully is not that high compared to the number of men. I think this is a grand experiment happening on an international level as we speak and we will keep you updated. Generally, for athletes, I work the uphill treadmill session once or twice a week. It's not like it has to be this everyday situation and doesn't also have to be every week either. Use it sporadically and just pay attention to how your body responds to it. Do you want to talk about this next semi-magic workout? Yeah, I like it. We can do it fast. Let's do it. This one is called steady or moderate running after intervals. The reason I wanted to talk about it is I was reading this amazing article on training peaks called the making of a pro-tour rider. It looked at five years with Wilbarta's journey to becoming a world-tour rider from an under-23 rider. This is a wild jump in cycling. This is when athletes go from good power numbers, but more amateur level, to being able to put out power numbers for six hours. The thing that separates under-23 and pros in all the studies is their, quote unquote, durability. Okay, fatigue recesses. Yes, exactly. When we say durability, now we really just need to impart some like French on it. Durability. Durability, Dodd. I don't know why I'm trying to do a stereotypical accent of someone from, I should probably stop that right now. Actually, we should probably both stop that. I'm going to get canceled and it will be magic. One of the ways that they credited his durability increasing was that he did explosive efforts into steady efforts. What fascinated me about reading that is that this is the moment that when Megan started coaching really, really seriously in the mid-2010s, she came in and started using these workouts all the time and I never did before. They're not really that common in running. She was seeing patterns and I started using them because I know Megan's brilliant. I think you must have been seeing the same things they saw. I don't know. I stumbled into it accidentally with my own training. Me being kind of an idiot, I was. I would often do hill reps and then I was so excited about finishing my hill reps that I would run back down and back home a little bit faster. I was seeing a lot of bang for the buck and so I figured out a way to make that a little bit more nuanced and controlled. Often I'll give short 10 to 15 minute tempos after a series of hill reps or faster intervals. I think it's fantastic for fatigue resistance. We actually love there's a show that takes riders from Zwift, which is the training platform that we talk about constantly and they see who can become a pro-tour rider from that. One of the big tests is they have them go out for a long ride and then they surprise them and they give them a 20 minute hard hill climb. I think that principle is manifested a lot in how we design these workouts with tempo after the set intervals. Much like we do the fatigue resistance test, even before we knew about all of this research that's happening in cycling of a 20 minute climb at the end of a longer run, it's interesting how there is this overlap. Anytime there's overlap, pay attention. Here's a coach quote from the article. One of the workouts Will is talking about was explosive into steady. I like to call them Excel to tempo sets. It's a tricky name, but it looks like what it sounds like. It's essentially a workout where we do a series of short hard accelerations straight into a block of steady tempo. I wanted Will solid on the pedals in the steady tempo, but not working at threshold or TT pace or whatever folks want to call it. That's the perfect way to describe exercise physiology. Whatever folks want to call it. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's actually so true about coaching. Make sure if you want to get into coaching, don't be intimidated. It's all art, even as we talk about a lot of science. Basically, the theory there was that in clearing lactate and teaching your body to do that under load, you get extra benefits that might also be at the cellular level, could be mechanical. Essentially, we don't know exactly why it happens, but these are very common on the pro-tour level. For him, it improved his tired 20. That's the metric that Megan was tracking, how much power he could put out after 2,500 individuals have worked, so at the end of a longer ride. Super cool shit. I think for me, the cool shit is in the why behind this. Why do we think this is actually impacting performance? For me, it gets the idea. It really helps with lactate clearance. I think from a muscular standpoint, it's helpful to recruit the muscles at higher output and higher demand. After already having done this previous set of work, I think that really parallels the demands of racing in high performance. I think glycogen recovery, what happens when you're utilizing glycogen in these two different bouts, or so you're having the intense stimulus and then marrying in the tempo to that, and also neuromuscular as well? All of those are fascinating because there's studies on cyclids that find sprints can decrease muscle glycogen stores by 50%. Which is a lot. But then you have to recover it on the steady effort. What brings this and double thresholds together, I think it's really fascinating too. I think it might be the first element, the lactate clearance element. A lot of the theories with double thresholds is not that it decreases the amount of lactate you produce, is that it helps you clear it. So you're getting lower reads because your lactate shuttling is much more efficient, primarily through your midochondria. And similarly, this is a lactate clearance monster workout. Because if you do a hill repeats or the explosive efforts as they're saying, and then do the steady effort after, your body is by definition learning to process lactate. So that might be the big secret of all of this is what workouts improve lactate shuttling. That's the aerobic monster secret workouts that aren't that secret. It's just kind of harnessing this system within the body. And then basically knocking it down into submission until you really start adapting. And I think improving lactate shuttling is at the foundation of basically all training theory. And I think there's different ways to think about that. But I think the other important thing is that these are two independent entities. So we're not combining double threshold with steady effort after sessions and putting them together. So I think utilize these as different entities. Do you ever use them, I use them sometimes within like the same block training blocks for the same athletes? Do you do the same? Yeah, definitely. Though double thresholds are a little less common because they are so risky. And especially for the ultra athletes, we coach why take those risks when something like fueling can be a 10% difference in athletes. And this might be a 1% difference. And why take those risks steady after workouts use pretty consistently for everybody. Not all the time, but maybe once every two or three weeks in different contexts. And I think the lactate clearance point also underscores why effort control is so important on double thresholds. Because if you're producing a ton of lactate and you're just going harder and faster, you're not actually working lactate clearance because your body's not clearing it. Exactly. So you got to control that effort. And if you're not doing lactate measurements, that means really easing in and making sure you're disciplined. And similarly with these workouts, making sure that tempo after is not hard. Because if you go really, really, really hard and just build up a ton of lactate, then you're not doing this either. So I think that that might be what marries the two. And I think that it can actually be great to be doing them on downhills because I think you're not producing quite as much lactate because usually the effort is a little bit lower. But you're also getting the eccentric muscle contractions that go along with that. So that's why I love doing this after hill repeats because usually you're at the top of the hill and you're like, oh, well, it's fun to run down now a little bit faster. So it works well. I think another logistical consideration just to end this topic is that so we talked about doing them at the end of workouts. And you can also do them at the end of long runs to where you've done like a 20 minute climb that's a little bit more lactate producing within the context of the long run. And then end with something like anywhere up to an hour of progression. And we've worked that into our swap athletes and I think it's helped a ton. Well, that's the thing I'm going to get a little more courageous with that I haven't done a ton yet are we've done a lot of tempos after like these 10 to 20 minute things. But what Will Bart's coach is talking about here of doing, let's say an hour steady after harder efforts, that's going to be something I get a little bit more courageous with because I think as we talk about fatigue, resistance or durability, it might be one of those secret keys and I want to find the magic so I can keep it up Megan. That's fun, the magic, but you really have to trust the athletes so that an hour study is not an hour all out. So it requires us like coach athlete trust and an athlete understanding what what their mechanisms of RPE or relative perceived exertion are. Yeah. And for every athlete, even if you're not considering this stuff, the big lesson is just make sure you control your efforts as we talked about on recent episodes. Okay, now we're going to talk about the Strava saga. I think this will be really fun. Before we do that, make sure you're subscribed to our Patreon if you can. Every week we dig into tons of listener questions. We might not get to them on the main podcast today, but in the future we're going to be bringing to the main podcast a little bit. So we have a bonus podcast where we answer 10 or so questions sometimes. We do a science corner every week. It is so fun. So patreon.com slash swap SWAP SWAP. We have it's a really fun like low key vibe. We have a great community built up on there. So fine. So we're going to talk about the next podcast with other podcast audience members who are probably like minded to you. I think we're weird enough, David, that we have a somewhat like minded podcast audience. Well, if the black can in ads and scare people doing things right. Okay. So the Strava saga is really fascinating. So a few weeks ago or a month ago now, DC Rainmaker, who's one of the preeminent gear review people in the world and is really respected, found that the price increases for Strava subscription services weren't being communicated across the board. They were different across countries. They were increasing in what felt like arbitrary ways and they weren't being directly discussed with subscribers. He put out a post on that a video that was very good and entertaining and it got hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of views and and Strava responded with crickets. They didn't really respond to his emails. And I think it created a lot of tension there that was probably a mistake. And then Strava recognized their mistake and they were like, Oh, shoot, we have to put out a post. Yeah. And I think the wording in this post is just kind of a beautiful affection on what happens when you make a mistake and how you can own that mistake, but then also move forward with confidence. And I think we've all made mistakes in our lives. I've made mistakes. We certainly made mistakes as swap as a business entity, hopefully not major ones, but we're working through that. And I think this is just a fun like business case study as to how you apologize and move forward. Well, we all make mistakes because I just made a stereotypical voice. I just a second ago and we're going to keep it in. So think about how you would respond. You have people unloading on you on social media and you have the CEO actually resigned around this time. Was that because of this or was it part of the plan? There's all this murmur about maybe Strava is actually struggling. Maybe this is a sign of weakness. Maybe they're actually going to go out of business. I don't think they are. They've got millions of users and those aren't just going to like disappear into the ether. I agree. But this is that gets back to their statement called setting things straight. So I'm just going to read a very brief intro to it. There's been some noise about Strava. We're going to take a minute to set things straight. One, we're building the best subscription for active people and our 100% committed to staying there, growing on par to faster than any company in our space. Two, while we missed some communication recently, people are voting with their actions. Despite what you read, our numbers continue to move in the right direction. Three, one of the healthiest subscription businesses on the internet. Three years of profitability. Our plan is to still be building for you in 100 years. Then it went on and had nine points. But the idea being that they responded to these concerns and these worries in a way that's very different than I would. They basically said, come at me, bitches. We're good. We're crushing it. But I think when you do that though, you actually, I really respect this, but I think Strava can actually stand behind these statements because they're doing the work. I think it's very different when you have a company like Theranos that's like, yo, we crush in bitches. But in reality, they didn't even have a product that was performing. And so I think in order to make these sentiments, you have to back it up with actual actions. And Strava's doing that. So I think it's about apologizing. It's about responding with swag, but then also having actions that back up, that swag can be point to you. Well, it's interesting to think about life as a branding exercises because as much as like you hate to do that, everything is about personal brand. Even things like relationships, you are both brands interacting with each other. Are we brands, bangin, David? Yeah, yeah. We're banging brands together. We're McDonald's and Burger King coming together into something brilliant. You know what we are. Can I be Burger Queen? Yeah. You ever seen those KFCs and Taco Bells that are like in the same building? Oh, yeah. That's what we are. I thought you were going to say in the same like a chicken fried taco. It's true. You're the taco. I'm the fried chicken and we make it happen. But it's interesting to think about how you deal with criticism in that context. Like, I think there's a tendency to like say apologize for criticism immediately and unreservedly. And I think that's kind of our personality. Yeah. I think that's what we've done in this situation. And I think Strava is modeling a different approach. And I think it might be discussed in business schools in the future. I don't know about this. But I think their approach is probably the right one. And that if someone criticizes you, if you totally validate that criticism, you're immediately giving it credence where it'll just become conventional wisdom amongst a broader sphere. So often we respond to criticisms that are a very small, very loud group of people. And in that sense, become what they're criticizing. And so what I'm going to try to learn from this, or at least apply from this, is a little bit more swag in the face of criticism. I mean, we've been practicing that recently in different contexts. And I think we'll continue to do that. But to kind of lean into that a little bit more. That being said, I think it depends on what you're being criticized for. Definitely. Strava is being criticized just for something that's business related. I think there have been times in like, in history, when someone has been criticized for something much more severe, like racist comments. And if you don't handle that with seriousness of being like, I'm sorry, I messed up. That's a problem. So I think it also depends on the context in what you're apologizing for. Sometimes you have to come out and be like, I am deeply sorry. That was not meant. And I think there's situations where that is called for, but this is not one of them. Yeah. And it's just really interesting to think about as we all navigate our own world, you know, it's like, where do you draw the line between like just owning it and not apologizing versus just immediately apologizing? I don't know. I think it's complicated, but I think it depends on the situation. It's a lot like coaching and exercise physiology. There's eight different terms for how you should apologize. Or you're channeling a bad Italian accent. Fortunately. It's an Italian or French. Oh, it's a good point. I don't know. Yeah. That's always bad when you don't even know what you're trying to do. It was excellent enough. Okay. Do we want to do the relationship episode follow up or is that a little bit too long for today? What do you think? Let's do it. Yeah, we'll give the listeners. If you're out in a long run, you get some bonus content. Awesome. Yeah. So the Valentine's Day episode last week, people really like the relationship stuff. So let's end with one follow up that we didn't quite get to on last week's episode. But I think is an amazing one that everyone will identify with. So here's the question. I'm in college and have never been in a relationship, had my first kiss, or really done anything romantic. I feel like I'm doing something wrong, but just don't know how to go about finding someone I truly love and to respond to me. Advice? Well, my first advice is you're doing nothing wrong. No. I mean, if it happened, David and I, we had very limited relationship history coming into our relationship. I was like, David, I kissed a kid on the bus once and the seventh grade and it was great. And you basically had a same situation. I masturbated to some Pac-Man ghosts. Was it fun? Was it fun? Was it fun? Was it fun? I didn't actually. Maybe I did. It changed boys, man. Sorry. I had to do the call back. I couldn't help it. It was so weird. I think it was the same thing. Like almost no relationship history with non-eat-bit video game characters. And I think that loneliness you describe is one that is almost ubiquitous in ways that we don't think about. Everyone thinks everyone else is always more advanced and farther along in the process. And the answer is they aren't. Like you thought I was. Oh my gosh. I came into the start of a relationship. Yeah. This is because I was good at kissing. It was. I researched everything about how to please a woman. It was like she knows. So I need to figure it out quickly. Well because we hadn't really talked about this like early on in a relationship. And I think you just assumed and I was like, damn dude, where is that assumption coming from? Because you're sexy as hell. Like that's why. And so, you know, this listener, you're going through that. Like the goal here is not necessarily to find a partner for life. And I think sometimes it can feel like, oh well, since I put this on a pedestal so much, and it's ever going to happen. The answer I think is to celebrate the vulnerability, the shooting your shot element, rather than the like quote unquote success or like even going on a second date with someone or even going on a first date with someone, essentially learning to put yourself out there because by the nature of this question, you've probably gone used to not putting yourself out there because you haven't had good luck with it in the past. And putting yourself out there is the best way to find a partner that's going to be a good fit for you in the long term. Definitely. Because if you don't do that, you're playing a character and it's going to be impossible to sustain playing that character in the long term. So I think be open, be honest about it, and the right person will understand and uplift that vulnerability and make it special and beautiful in its own way. And you don't need to find the right person. Find a person. Yeah, exactly. Like vulnerability takes practice. Yeah. If you're not like, you know, and also if you're asexual and don't, there are an interesting relationship that would be great too. Well, it's a lot like racing. Run a lot of races and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. You got to shoot your shot a lot. And so for this listener, what we talked about is consider dating apps to start. Like put yourself out there, be honest, be yourself, but like go on dates. Like the goal is not to have successful dates is to go on them. But design the dates that you want to do. Don't be on dumb dates where you're like, why am I here? Go run the mountains. That's what you enjoy. And like, I feel like having fun in the process is just as much a part of it. Or go to running groups or go to other good and knitting groups, whatever. Go to places that are social settings and be the awkward person that makes things uncomfortable by asking someone out to coffee or whatever. Keep doing that over and over and over again and try to view rejection as part of the game, right? Like the failure doesn't make you, if you fail, it doesn't make you a failure, another quote from Warren Fushman. And I think that that's the key in relationships, something I didn't learn, right? And it wasn't until Megan and I, you know, finally got to meet that I understood vulnerability. And the funny thing is as soon as I opened myself up in that vulnerability, it found the woman for me, you know, for the rest of my life. And it's the coolest thing. It took smashing together KFC and Taco Bell. It was the magic it was all about. It took responding to that Facebook message for that sexy woman with a lot of sexual experience. Okay. On to Listen to Her Corner. Just a little follow up this related. I just listened to your Valentine's episode and that ending was the best yet. So many smiles when I'm out running and listening to the podcast, Megan's laugh to end it was a highlight. Keep your flying, your freak flags. Oh, that means a ton. We had a lot of fun on that relationship episode and I think it opened our eyes. I would love to just answer more questions at the end of a podcast episode. We didn't really do any research. We just kind of came with whatever thoughts we had and it was a fun manifestation of our time together. Yeah, it was so good. And it gets back to how much we love all of the listeners. Like it's such a cool group that we can basically say anything and be accepted by most of you. Maybe not the ones that just found us via the Black Canyon. But hey, some of you will be our people and that we are excited to know. Well, if they found us via the Black Canyon ad, I hope they're pleasantly surprised what we have going on here today. That was a lot. That is so true. It was a lot today, but it was so fucking fun, Megan. It was so much fun. I just love you so much. I love you so much. Also, if you've been it this far, we have had major sound issues that we have now resolved. We have recorded this episode for like eight different hours and you want David, I'm proud of us for persevering. I'm really proud of us too. We got a new mic in this process. So if you hear this amazing noise, I had to go to Best Buy to get this and it looks like the most futuristic dildo you've ever seen. It is gorgeous. It has lights all over it. And I think it's going to bring us much closer together. It's ready to be talkified. Let's go talkified this motherfucker, Megan. Oh yeah. Alright. We love you all.