144. Threshold Training Explained, New Studies on Supershoes, and HILL BEASTS!

Woo, welcome to the Summer Call Play podcast. We are so happy to do with you today. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And I'm marinated and love over here on this Tuesday because we just went on a hot grocery store date, David. It was so much fun. Yeah, it was so fun. When was the last time we went to the grocery store together? Definitely when I was pregnant, far before that we had Leo, and it was so fun. We were just wandering the aisles together. You were doing the hardcore grocery shopping and I was like kind of identifying the pasta that had fun C-shaped. Yeah, you were kind of a shithead in the grocery store and she just wandered around and get like one thing that's really expensive. And I'm just doing all the bulk shopping for the life that we lead. You're just grabbing eight spinages off the front of a Nile shelf and I'm like, oh, here's pasta with C-shaped. So it's great. Yeah, that's actually my hot tip for our listeners is if you're cooking at home and you just don't love the thought of having to plan out like seven different dinners a week, what you should do is do stir fry every single night so you have brown rice or quinoa or something that you get in the packet that's real cheap. Then you get something like good tuna or good salmon and then you get frozen veggies and then you get tons of oily flavors. We do that every night with cheese. It's pretty amazing. I'm feeling so wonderful. It's so delicious. The cheese in there is outstanding. So you were loading all these vegetables up onto like the conveyor belt to check out or whatever. And there was kind of a long line. It was like Whole Foods in the middle of the day and you whipped out your dinosaur Velcro wallet to pay that had like all over Whole Foods gift cards in there. And we're just holding up the line and it was so funny to see the reactions on people's faces and they're like, it's the dinosaur dude. Megan, we talk all the time about not giving an F about what people think. It's like if your intentions are good and my intentions were so good, which was to save us money because Whole Foods is expensive then you can't worry about it. So I didn't even notice. You were like, David, hurry along. And I'm like, Megan, don't stop me. I'm doing the Lord's work here. Well, I didn't care what they think. I just, I didn't want them not to wait for five minutes. So that's how like dinosaur wallet situation to go down. Megan, they went to Whole Foods at like mid day on like a random ass weekend. I'm pretty sure they're doing wonderful and don't need our help. Yeah, perhaps that's true, but it was so much fun. It was like a, going to Whole Foods together is like a reflection of our love. It was, it was great. But actually, so we recorded this podcast. This is our second recording of the podcast. And we are now, I think 90 seconds in the podcast. So we can say what we were gonna start with, which is we have really groovy sound going on. We do have really good sound. What was your exact term you used on the previous attempt we did at this podcast? I said, you know what? We found our microphone G-spot. Great, it is so good. But you told me we couldn't put that in the first 60 seconds of the podcast. The first 60 seconds of our podcast apparently has to be family friendly. I know that. So what can happen, and we've heard this from listeners is sometimes it will like auto play after another podcast finishes or on their phone when the car starts up. And if you start in the first 10 seconds with G-spot, we might be having some seven year old ask their mom what a G-spot is. And the point being like, no one really knows what a G-spot is. So I don't wanna put the mom in that position. You can just make something up, this Cooper spot. Actually though, I think we're gonna face this challenge because we've decided that we're not gonna make anything up when Leo asks. Yeah, I mean, it'll be really an interesting parenting style, especially if they listen to podcasts like ours. Yeah, do you think that that's the right way to do it with Leo? I mean, it depends. I mean, I think, you know, he might ask really young things about like Santa Claus or things like that. And I think we'd definitely tell him the truth. I think we have an, like, you know, I think you can tell the truth. And I think you can spin stories around the truth, but I think we'll always tell him like the truth and bring in some sexy science along with it. I love it. So make sure your kids aren't listening for the next like 15 seconds. But kids, if your parents are still letting you listen, ask about the G-spot in Santa Claus. Well, how do you find it on the microphone? How do you find it on Santa Claus? Yeah. Okay, let's get to the episode. We have such a fun series of topics today. We have follow up some recent episodes that are gonna get into some substance. Megan's trip to a conference on performance last week, that was really fun. Recent studies on super shoes, a study on talent, and a study on zero-calorie sweeteners, all things we're gonna riff off and have some ideas. And then finally, a big training topic on threshold and how it all fits in. In the context of a study that just came out the other week, that is one of the coolest manuscripts I've ever seen. This might be my favorite study of all time, which is really hard to choose. I think there's a figure in the study, figure three, that is the ultimate G-spot of studies. I feel like with the G-spot in the microphone, you don't know what it is until you've found it. And we have found the G-spot in the figure. It's so good. I'm really excited to dive into it. I feel like the next time you go to a conference, you need to present on how to do studies and just say, you know what, it's all about making a figure that is like orgasmic, which is how it was for us. So basically that figure three, which we're gonna get into, is a full view of training. From easy training to hard training and how it all fits in, and how it fits in biochemically, how it fits in training theory-wise, in a few words in one visual. I have never seen anything quite like it. Actually, there's a lot of words. They sucked a lot of words into one figure. It was a very small font. Yeah, very, very small font. I don't know if necessarily like a design, someone who's thinking about figure design would love it, but I freaking loved it. That's different things go for different people. Yeah, our level languages content. Yes. Okay, so first follow up is you might have remembered the relationship episodes. There was one of the questions we got that was about someone who hadn't really had a kiss, had never been on a date, and they were asking about advice. You know, because we give all this other type of relationship advice. And our wisdom at that point was essentially, just go on dates. Like we don't care if they're good, put yourself on every online platform, and go on as many as you can. Going good dates, bad dates, everything in between. And the update is they've gone on a few dates. They even had second and third dates. And they say- Oh, man. They are loving the process of getting vulnerable. This is so cool. David, I'm loving the process of being a wing person. I feel like it's like our ultimate calling in life is just to be the hype person of like, you can do it, get that kiss, go for it. Well, that's actually relevant because we also did a like singles announcement from someone that lived in the mountains of Colorado. You might remember that. That got people interested. And we just set up two people that are going to meet at some point in the future, two podcast listeners. And so we'll let you know how that goes too. Megan, we're just rocking it here. Hi, five, David. I'm excited for us. We should probably share with these people though. We have a horrific history of matchmaking. Like we are- Like in real life. In real life, we are really bad at matchmaking. Why, I don't know why that is. Maybe we're too optimistic. We're like, you guys are gonna be perfect together and they have nothing in common. I think the problem is we see the best in everyone that's in our lives. That's true. To the point that like, we'd be like, oh well, we'd fuck them. It's like, David, that's a dog. It's like, oh, sorry. I just really like this dog. Maybe they should look at our like, how we cook for reference. Like I feel like we're just like smattering together all different types of ingredients that have no reason being together. It's like peanut butter and soy sauce in one meal. And we're like, let's see what happens. Also, we don't judge because we just do the same meal every night. Good point. Similarly, we don't judge people. So, but that is actually a serious thing for podcast listeners. If you want us to do like a dating profile of you and you're comfortable giving either your geographic information or not, or any autobiographical information, we'll talk about you on the podcast. We'll be your wing person and we'll try to get you hooked up with another podcast listener. Do it be really fun. It's just a separate podcast with those profiles and we just like riff off of those profiles and make endless fun of people and then set people up together. Maybe we'll see how many we get after our current riffs we had on this episode. But that does bring up one thing I wanted to do in this podcast, but we didn't. Is to go through all 10 best picture nominees because we've only seen one of them, I believe, everything everywhere all at once and just riff on what we think it's about. But Megan vetoed that. So Megan, you're cock blocking the race. Okay. It would be so much fun. But actually for our relationship, I think our highest relationship date recently has been sleeping. Sleeping? Yeah. Oh, I gross your stores. I had good conversations. Grosser stores versus sleeping. I don't know. Sleeping is like orgasmic right now. I think this is what happens when you have a kid. It's like we're working hard, we're training hard, we're parenting hard. Then come 730, I'm like, all I want to do is sleep. Yeah, there are moments where I turn over in bed and I'm like, you're about a foot away. It's too far to lean over for a good nightcare. I don't know if I can do it right now. It's like scaling the Great Wall China to get to my face if I'm going to happen. Definitely not going to happen. Okay, next quick follow up is on the Lauren Fushman episode, people absolutely loved it. I was going to say liked it. And I was like, you probably shouldn't say absolutely before, we got lots of great feedback. And yeah, just wanted to thank you all for sending in your thoughts on that. I think Lauren really opened up on that episode, which was exciting because it wasn't just about her book. We went outside the confines of that. I don't know, I was really humbling to hear her story. She was incredible to get to talk to you. And I don't love going back and listening at her episodes. I get really anxious and awkward when I listen to us talk. But throw Lauren in there. I was like, I want to listen to this twice just to hear the wisdom that she had. I feel like we could just toss her a topic and she would spout wisdom. Like beautiful, beautiful words about life and topics. And it was just so cool to get to hear it often. Yeah, it was so awesome. And I mean, I think one of the most interesting reflections she had on there that we just wanted to call out really quickly was on jealousy, where she said, anytime you feel jealousy, it's a clue into something that you are coveting. That hit me so hard. I was like, whoa, Lauren, that's beautiful. Yeah, and I really liked that. But at the same time, I kind of disagreed in some ways because I'm like, I think it's also kind of like a primate human nature. That's true. I don't even want to accomplish almost anything. I feel a moment of like, I deserve that. It's like at the Oscars, when they win the best picture, I'm going to be like, that should have been me. Everything everywhere all at once. What about my movie that I've never made? So also wanted to give you permission to have those feelings in your life. I feel like, yeah, as she was saying that, I was like, Lauren, your perspective on jealousy is so evolved. I had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask and I was challenging because we only had an hour with her. And when she's like, when she spouts wisdom, like that's on all these topics, it's like, I just want to go into the weeds on everything. So one question I had to ask her, and I don't know if this is like necessarily appropriate, but is her perspective on jealousy, I wonder how that relates to her non-monogamous relationship that she talked about of 10 years, because it's like, I feel like in order to have a relationship like that, you have to have a really evolved perspective on jealousy. Yeah, do you think you could do it? Oh, fuck no. Yeah, I know. So note to self, eliminate that topic of conversation. It sounds like a nightmare to me. I don't know how people do it. I mean, if you were together with someone, I'd be like, let me find their house, their money, all of their Strava segments. I literally, I mean, I think actually, I've evolved a lot on the jealousy perspective as it relates to competition and training. I like truly uplift all my competitors, everyone I compete against. And I think, I've had an athletic journey, but on relationship, I'll help now. It's really interesting to think about all the different types of relationship structures. Like, we present like a very specific type of relationship, obviously. But one thing I've seen in coaching is that once you get to know people, including a lot of the people that might present relationships that look like ours or someone else's on Instagram, it's totally different behind the scenes. Like, there are so many people that have open marriages or non-monogamous relationships and things like that. And it's fascinating. Like, I don't know enough about it to say anything interesting, but I do imagine that it would transfer to your feelings on jealousy more generally if you haven't evolved perspective on it. I guess the question is, how often can you be truly evolved on those things? I don't know. I mean, I don't know the science behind it. It's a really good question. I had so many like questions to ask her about this. Like, one of the questions I had was, what is it like, I think, to be in a relationship structure like this, but to present differently? Like, I don't think they've talked about this until recently. So that was a whole 10-year gap where they were having like a non-monogamous relationship, but presenting differently like on social media and on to places. And I wonder if that like, discordance or that disconnect is really hard. Well, I mean, are they presenting that way or is that just the way we assume that every relationship is? A good point, yeah. Because of like societal biases, you know? Yeah. Like, that's actually one of the things I've always, I've started to think about a lot more recently is, you know, I think a lot of the times we fill in the blanks. And it's not the job of people in social media or online to fill in every detail, right? And as a result of filling in the blanks, we assume types of lives that the person isn't even saying. So like, when we talk about jealousy in social media, we'll see some beautiful picture and we'll be like, oh, well, this person is leading the life I want to leave. Elite. The point is, I think often people say, well, social media is dishonest. It's like, no, the person actually isn't saying that. They're just posting a cool picture of their run and saying some cool things. It's like, yes, that is probably true to their lives. They're not, they are not obligated to tell you about, like, I don't know, their herpes or whatever. Well, it's also like, how do you talk about that when the confines of a paragraph on Instagram? So I mean, it's actually fascinating because I think I've always thought about unconscious bias as like relating to deep things, like prejudice and racism. But I guess it applies to even situations like this. Like how we view someone's relationship structure. Like I'm viewing it through the lens of our relationship bias. Yeah, which is our crush of bitch if we were non-monogamous. I love it. That's perfect. Next topic that is pretty interesting is on microbiome testing. So we talked a lot about the science of microbiome recently. And what we did after that is we paid for microbiome testing. We didn't do it through a sponsorship or anything because we wanted to give you our unbiased review. And our review is so unbiased that we're not going to tell you the company name because it's a little bit too harsh, which is we do not think at least the service we use is a valuable worthwhile thing at this point in the scientific progression. I think they're much better services out there. I would give the official review of this one sucks shit. And that's even through the lens of like, highly optimistic matchmaking. Matchmaking type people. Yeah, it was not great. My problem was they just gave us like blanket recommendations as to what we should do based off our microbiome. But they didn't tell us what was in our microbiome. So they didn't actually give us like the microbes or anything behind it. So it was like doing an inside tracker test. And inside tracker telling you you should like eat dark chocolate but not telling you that your iron is low. And I'm like, why would I do these things with no supporting evidence? The biggest upset of all is that I was given a microbiome score of 61, which was considered good. Megan was given a microbiome score of 59, which is less than me. Really, I don't even see that. It got lost in the mix of everything. First thing I looked for was that one number because no one who has ever heard me go to the bathroom would assume that my microbiome score is better than Megan's. So I'm taking the win. I think everyone has always assumed that like I got some disease process going on and nope, I'm better than you. You know, I think it was just entirely random. They made us take a survey like a 30 minute survey before we were able to get our results back, which is the ultimate swag. It's like if you want someone to take a survey, just hold their results back. But I feel like they were just giving us results based off of what we selected was important to us. One thing they told us both though, was not to eat broccoli. And you might have heard that in the stir-fries, we're doing a lot of vegetables. We're in the past, we haven't necessarily talked about all the vegetables we eat. Well, you had a stance about vegetables, but was it? Oh, that vegetables are pre-poop, which gets back to my microbiome talk. But after we got this news that broccoli wasn't good for either of us and should be a must avoid food, we just put it in everything immediately. We're like, you can't tell us what to do. That is not okay. And it's been so good. David, why are you so good at making broccoli? You just smother it in cheese. I don't even know if you can classify it as broccoli when it's basically, I think 90% of it's actually cheese. Yeah, I'll take my cheese with a side of broccoli. Yeah. I think it's the way it goes. Yeah, basically, we're not saying that these are useless. We're saying that for us, it was too much information about ourselves that was general and not enough that was specific. Yeah. That's not to say that it's a bad thing. We want to make sure in case anyone does figure out what we use, it's great. We want the company to be successful. For us, it wasn't something that we're willing to stand behind. Which it also gets to, we try to be honest on here about things that we care about. Inside Tracker, great example. We love Inside Tracker to get your blood work done because you get all your blood work and recommendations and you can cross correlate it with other information online and studies and things. This one, I couldn't find the raw data. Maybe that it's out there, but it wasn't easy to find. And that's not like, we need some raw data or at least some more understanding of where the connections are. And I think for me, when I'm kind of like an independent thinker at fault, it's like I need really a lot of supporting evidence to actually change what I'm going to do. And sometimes I don't even do it with supporting evidence. And then sometimes you just need to deep throat some broccoli. The final little thing I wanted to mention is I've been doing a lot of controlled threshold style training recently, personally, as we're going to talk about in the main training topic later on. And I've been using a Garmin 745 watch just to dictate a little bit of understanding my effort at the beginning of these intervals to make sure I don't go too hard right off the bat because it's very easy to err on the side of pushing just a little bit. And the heart rate graphs have been freaking beautiful. Works of art. I've posted them online and people are like, that is wrist space. I think some of the biases that people might have against wrist space heart rate are a little bit misplaced. So it might be worth seeing if it works for you. Promised these watches are kind of expensive. So I don't really know how people can see if it works without actually buying something that costs a few hundred bucks. Well, your heart rate graphs have a G spot in them. They could belong in MoMA. They're beautiful. They are beautiful. Yeah. So something with a G spot belonging in MoMA. You're combining those? Yeah, combining those two together. Yeah, it's good. We should really just create a museum of heart rate art. I love it. It's so sad if it's time, though, actually, when you get really beautiful heart rate data and it's like, you can beautifully see your efforts. And even, I mean, I think bonus points when it's wrist space too, because I don't always expect that. I don't have great wrist-based heart rate. And the studies are saying in general that wrist space isn't great. But the problem with studies is that the review process takes years. So often you're looking at data that is years old. And at least on the newer garments, they've been pretty outstanding for me. But it depends on skin tone and individual, even where your veins lie beneath the surface and things like that. So take it all with a grain of salt. We get a lot of athletes sending in their heart rate data so that we can do the lactate threshold heart rate calculations. And hey, still send those in if you want that, because we're still doing those. But some of the wrist-based heart rate sucks. And I can tell right away. And some is very good. So try to find out what you are. Well, I think actually this is helpful for the listeners out there. How do you tell if you're sometimes it's truly obvious that your heart rate wrist-based heart rates is not great? How do you tell? I think the main thing is to just do a normal run and look at if it elevates on uphills appropriately. So push the uphills a little bit on your run. And if you essentially see it, the elevation graph manifested in your heart rate data, you can trust it for general trends. I would never use it for a one minute interval. I don't think wrist-based is really great for that. But it might be good for longer distance stuff. For me, if I'm doing a run like I did this weekend where I'm running up a big mountain, it locks into my heart rate and it reads it within a beat of a chest strap all the time. If I'm in so, that's a great way to just determine it. Does it manifest the uphills in the heart rate data? And I think for me, I read flags when athletes are having really high heart rate on downhills instead, because sometimes the mechanical pounding of that actually just picks up the cadence. So trails are a really interesting place to look at how accurate your wrist-based measurements are. Definitely. OK, so we have five really fun topics to get to now. These are going to be a mix of quick hitters, substantive things, studies, and other things that hopefully help your athletics and life. You want to do this? I'm excited. Let's dive in. Let's dive in. First, we're going to dive in to precision hydration, which is a company. And for full disclosure, they sent us a free grab bag of their stuff. And we get a lot of free stuff from people that want us to talk about on the podcast. We get so much stuff building up on our porch. It's kind of wild. Actually, if you're a podcaster, I didn't quite realize this. Just how much stuff people will send you. Yeah, and we appreciate it. Yeah, it's amazing. We like trying it out. But we don't really talk about free stuff unless we love it. We don't talk about probably 99% of it. Yeah. And so I was skeptical about precision hydration, too, just because it's more stuff. And it probably took us a month to actually open the box. And that's also a product of having a baby. And yeah, we're a little behind. But I have absolutely loved this shit. It is really, really good. What do you love about it? So a few things that I wanted to mention. The first is they just have these like sodium caps things, very similar to noon, that are nice to put in water. That's not really the reason I want to talk about it. The reason I want to talk is that they have a 360 calorie gel pouch. And so their gels are liquid, essentially. So you can squeeze it out real fast. And on the run this weekend, it was a 22-mile or withdrew. Which you crushed. Thank you. I'm pretty excited. So we got to the top. And the gel was in a place where I didn't really want to take it out while we were pushing up the hill. So we stopped at the top, did a pee, and brought this out. And it was a 360 calorie gel that I took in like two squeezes of this gel pouch, and then sealed back up. That's so impressive. And my stomach felt great. And that leads me to think that they might have a really good formulation here. I like the consistency. The taste is whatever, neutral. So it might be an opportunity that is really good. Also they make 100 milligram caffeine gels. Oh, wow. Which I don't take during exercise, but I got to be honest. A few sips of that before a run. And I am ready to freakin' rock. You're ready to go into orbit. This is like Nick Morgan, who raised Black Canyon's 100K. And she hadn't really had caffeine before. And in semi-picture of a 75 milligram gel, and I was like, time to go into orbit. Yes. Yeah, so I just sip a little bit of those. So really liking precision hydration. If you're curious about it, try the 360-cowry, super-sized liquid gels. We are not sponsored. And to give you an idea of how much we enjoy it, we placed a $200 order this morning. So that's just using our own money and supporting a company that seems like they're doing really cool things. Yeah, I'm excited to try it too. It's really nice for a long time I wasn't training. And I got so sad because I couldn't try all these new liquid gels and hydration products out there on the market. And now it's like, can bask in their greatness. Yeah, and there's so many cool things. I think if you ever think something doesn't work for you, try one of the others. Yeah, exactly. So I like precision hydration. I love science and sport. Their beta-fueled gel is what a lot of the pro-peloton is taking in cycling. It is fucking fantastic. We're huge fans of Goo energy and what they make. Basically, I think every company has redeemable things within their gels. And every single person is different. So experiment, get freaky with it. Be like us and our stir fries. Try new things all the time. You wrote what you're really saying. Just fuck around and find out. Fuck around with those gels and find out. Next week, topic, you went to a conference last week, Megan. It was so much fun. Well, I mean, it's big because I left both you and Leo, which was really challenging as a new mom. I feel like Leo is four months old. And as I was driving out the door, I was like, could pie, Leo? I was crying on the way to airport. And I kind of forgot about him on the plane. I don't necessarily mean like, Leo is like, oh gosh, I just love Leo so much. But then it was like, I just like worked back into normal life and it was great. And then she just never came back. That's what I was saying. We're actually recording this remotely. And I was like, that whole grocery store thing was made up. Megan's currently in Fiji. It's on the beach with a pool boy. It's a lot. Yeah, you thought I was at the conference. I was really on the beach just taking you like preloaded pictures I had, giving you preloaded pictures on my phone. It was great. But no, I love that. I mean, one of the main things like I'm trying to encourage is spread your wings in terms of your professional nature. And we talked about this a little bit on the Patreon podcast. But I want to say it here too, because I think it's important for you to fully own this, but also to get the recognition you deserve, which is like, with the athletes you coach, you are probably the most accomplished female coach in the world for trail and ultra owners. And I think it's almost undeniable not to say that other coaches aren't amazing. It's just like the shit you've done is incredible. So for you to go to this conference, which is on sports performance and stuff, I'm like, that honestly is probably the harder decision than staying home with the baby. Society might be pushing you more to stay home or whatever. So yeah, go spread your wings as this coach and doctor that just is dominating the world. Oh, thank you. Well, I'm sitting here smiling awkwardly, because this is normally where I would insert a self-depreciating joke to marinate in the awkwardness. But I'll just say thank you. It means a ton. Like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was really nice to go. And I think the more I can learn and soak in. But it was also really cool too, because as I was getting on the plane, you're texting me the coolest stuff. You're like, you're on vacation now, I can breeze it. And I don't know, I think I carry at this certain level of mom guilt going for that long and leaving you here as a single parent. And you're like, spend money, girl. Enjoy it. You're on vacation. And it was so cool. This is why we sell those athletic greens, honey. Yeah, no, it was actually really fun to be home with Leo. I didn't mind at all. But yeah, so what was the conference in general? I actually haven't even asked you what the overarching theme of it was. It was the Woosai Human Performance Alliance, which is this alliance of multiple different institutions coming together to do sports performance research. And so people were sharing some of it was early research, some of it was published research. And it was amazing. It was across the different spectrums. But it was so fun to sit in the audience. I was sitting in the back. I was going to have all these pictures of PowerPoint slides up on the screen with just people's backs of the heads. So I could remember them. So I have like 50 slides on my phone that pop up at some point. That's our dirty talk when we're apart from each other is like some people do phone sex. Megan just sending me like 50 slides of things. And I'm like, without any explanation, I have to zoom in. And I'm just like, why are there mice on this thing right now? I don't understand what's happening at all. What is this? It's so fun to get to send those slides to you. I'm like, David, I'll appreciate it. No context either. Just people's back heads and then the slides. I do. I'm also like, who is there? Barbara. Good job. OK, so any specific types of slides that were interesting to you that you saw? Tons of really cool stuff. I think one that stood out. And this was actually just a short. They did a lightning talk. Can you imagine doing a talk for one minute? One minute. They had one minute lightning talks. I'm like, that would give me anxiety. Oh my god. Yeah, it's like you got to get up there and you got a wrap. You got to wrap real fast. But anyway, someone wrapped on. So they're creating a mouse model of red, which I think is super cool. So red's being under fueling essentially. Yes, red's being low energy availability. We've talked about it quite a bit on this podcast. But really helpful to have in a mouse model form. I'm a little skeptical because it's, you know, red's is a combination of low energy availability. And you can get there through a combination of pathways, whether that's under eating or over training. But I think it's kind of hard to create that like full spectrum of how an athlete gets to a red. But when you have a mouse model, you can like look at organs. You can do really sad things to mice to learn more. Yeah. So how do you make it happen in a mouse? Like how do you get a mouse into reds via training? They had mice running 15 kilometers, which is a lot. That's a lot of time for those little mouse legs. That is so far. I mean, I don't know if it's like proportional, but that would be like a human running like 600 miles a week. Yeah, it was a one minute lightning talk. So I had so many questions for them. But I mean, I imagine too, they were also skewing their food, but they didn't talk about that. Yeah. Well, we need to learn a lot more about like what happens in mice. Because I think it is a very interesting avenue in the research. And one of the reasons that we talk so much about fueling is in studies, it's hard to prove all of this stuff. Because the negative outcomes can never be something that happens in a control environment, right? Because you can't make someone go into this low energy availability state and monitor them. You only see the damage after it's happened, and then you talk about it. And that's one reason why we scream from the rooftops is because as coaches, let alone a mega-nazure researcher, we see what happens to athletes when they under-fuel or over-train that leads to under-fueling. It's an absolute shit show. And it's only partially captured in the studies. Like the studies talk about everything that happens. But this sheer extent of how long-term it can be and how nasty it can be, you can't really compare it to anything. So you don't have that ability to have a true scientific method. So it could be very cool. Which is actually similar to over-training. So over-training has the same methodological constraints. Like you can't just like ethically take a bunch of athletes and over-train them purposefully and see what happens. Though I imagine athletes would be willing to do that. He's like, sign me up. I'm going to run 200 miles as a science experiment and see what happens. Maybe that's what the Nike Oregon Project was. A little bit of a subject. I think it's good to hear what I'm going to do that now. I was going to say something else that probably wouldn't have been appropriate. About burritos? Oh, that would have been good too. I was just going to say something about a college program. OK, so a couple more studies on generally women's issues. So Megan is working at the female athlete program at Stanford. So there were a couple studies that came out just recently that we wanted to mention for athletes that might find some interesting things. First one is in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. It found an association between vitamin D intake and PMS symptoms in athletes, inclusion athletes in particular, which I think is really interesting for anyone out there that does suffer from particularly bad PMS symptoms. I think it was really interesting. I think there's a lot more research that needs to be done on this. So what they found was that lower vitamin D intake tended to be associated with more PMS symptoms. Yeah. And it was pretty strong. So in the group that had higher PMS symptoms, their intake was 39.4 IU per day compared to 66. And this was food sources of vitamin D only. I'm a little skeptical on that because supplement supplementing with vitamin D, a lot of athletes take 5,000 IU's, which is a lot. But I think certainly it's an area. We see vitamin D connected to so many different things. And it's hard to say what's the causal nature of that, because stronger health usually correlates to higher vitamin D. So it's hard to say. But I think it's something that for research in the future, and certainly if you struggle with PMS symptoms, vitamin D is harmless. It's like toss and ride it, but not harmless, but don't overdose on it. But controlled amounts of vitamin D supplementation, it's probably good for you anyway. I know you have to say that as a doctor, but in practice, we've seen a ton of blood work. And I've almost never seen excessively elevated vitamin D. It's really hard to get there. It's just taking one of those droppers and using them as a shot class. It would be like the athletic greens dropper of vitamin D has a year's supply in it. So I imagine if you took that, that might be toxic. Can I tell you something that I've never told you before? Oh my god, I'm really nervous right now. The first time that I took the athletic greens vitamin D, I didn't read the label, of course. So I just took the full dropper and put it into a glass of water, which is like, that must be like 100,000 I use at vitamin D. Unfortunately, I was like, I should read the package. I did not take it. Oh, okay, I was so worried. I was like, no, this would have caused all your health issues. Yeah, no. So I had like one sip of the water and then I realized what I was doing. And I was like, that was like 100,000 I use at vitamin D at the water class. You know what's gonna be a heart attack on the podcast? So yeah, for context, the athletic greens dropper is one drop is a thousand IU. And here we're just talking about 30 to 60. And I put one milliter in. Yeah, which is, I mean, I don't know how many drops that is. And it might even be like 400,000. I use it. Okay, I'm glad that didn't happen. But now is a great time to do an athletic greens promo because that vitamin D dropper comes free when you use our code, but not otherwise. Athleticgreens.com's a swap SWAP, SWAP. Obviously we love the green shit. It's awesome. It has made us feel great. But the vitamin D has also been game changing. And basically I think studies like this come out and show most athletes should be supplementing with vitamin D, even if it's a very small amount in the summer. So anywhere from 1000 to 5000 IU helps get a blood test to make sure you're a little low. But I think often athletes are right around 20 to 30. And it might not get flagged on every single panel. But if you get that up to 40 or 50, your bone health's gonna be better. And you might have less PMS, including like every athlete, just every athlete, less PMS across the board. David, I love your full scalp belief in athletic greens because anytime I feel bad, you're like, Megan, maybe it's time to start introducing athletic greens. And I have to remind you, I'm like, David, I'm breastfeeding. You can't do athletic greens. And you're like, well, maybe you should stop breastfeeding. No, I think my exact words say was, oh, I forgot about that. This thing that takes up three hours of your day every day. One final interesting thing about that study is it also monitored zinc and magnesium. So often the recommendations will be if you have bad PMS to take zinc and magnesium. The people that had worse PMS were taking higher levels of zinc and magnesium, which points out that those athletes were probably trying to medicate their symptoms. And it didn't really do anything for them. But what did seem to do things in this little N equals 30 study cohort, is that vitamin D intake. So think about it. I thought it was really interesting. A lot more follow up studies needed on this, especially I think vitamin D supplementation. So it's like, you know, supplementing 1000 IU's or 5000 IU's is really different than the 60 IU's the max group was getting. So yeah. Yeah. As the complicated thing about vitamin D's in general, is that you see associations with it across the board so often. Literally everything. It's wild. Yeah. There's so many confounding variables that you could be seeing other interactions going on. Actually, I work with one of the smartest biosetisticians that I consider in the field. And she does not like vitamin D research. Like confounding variables everywhere. I anecdotally though, this is an area that like, I see higher levels of vitamin D athletes often feel better. So it's like I have that anecdotal evidence to lean on, but she'd be having a coronary right now. She listened to us. Does she take athletic greens though? Yes, she does. That is the correct answer. You are not allowed to see anything else. And if you do, Megan, I'm going to go to PG. OK, final interesting study here is on women versus men. And it's an endurance study from sports medicine. Essentially what they did is they took a ton of trail race results and paired men and women based on the percent of the winner, like their time and what percent of the winner that was at shorter trail races. And they compared those same athletes at longer trail races. So they got athletes that were equivalent at short distances and went to see how man versus woman changed as the races got longer and longer and longer. And the findings are really interesting. So go women on these findings. So what they found was that the gap between sexes decreased as the distance increased. So the men's speed decreased by 4.02%. Whereas it only decreased by 3.25% for women. So women are having less of a decay of pace, which is really cool. They actually called this the men women ratio. It's maybe laugh. I don't know why. It seems like a funny term for this. I like it. I love how studies just make up terms. It's pretty freaking wonderful. Oh, we would have a lot of fun with that. I'm pretty sure we would get canceled. Actually, my dream someday is to write a scientific paper with you. That would be so fun. We'd have a lot of fun in that process. Well, we also gather a lot of data via coaching. I've always thought that is there a way to gather that data and publish it in a way that's helpful to people? Yeah, the answer is just really freaking complicated. We need an IRB doing studies. Actually, it's been an eye opening part of my PhD is just how long it takes to do studies. I feel like plan out your study and then add six months always. Well, it's a little frustrating because we have all this data on we call it fatigue resistance. Some recent studies call it durability. That would be so cool for people to see. And I think it would help a lot in terms of understanding different morphologies and approaches that might improve this variable. But we just kind of have to sit on it and refer to it obliquely. Well, we could bring it to an institution in someone we trust. That's usually a good way to do it. It's to collaborate with someone like an exercise physiology-based institution or collaboration. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so this study on the decay, so that 4% versus 3.25% was every 10 kilometers. So you can see that as the distance gets farther and farther, those percentages will start to compound and women will get closer and closer to the men. It's really fascinating. The question that brought up to me is how can male athletes be more like women? Because I think often this type of study is used in the New York Times or something to be like, hey, isn't this cool? But I'm like, OK, but there's also probably things we can learn there for performance that might help the male listeners. That's the most chauvinistic way to look at the study I've ever seen. It's like, how can this female athlete study help male athletes? I love that. I'm calling you out on it directly. But I think it's actually really interesting to think about. As a physiological principal, it's really cool. Also, the number of times the New York Times or the Washington Post has called me. And they want to quote about why women are outperforming men at longer distances is really high. But I think the answer is, so women have great fat metabolism, which helps over these distances. Another thing, women are great at pacing. I don't know if that's like, that probably is more on the psychological side of things. But it does impact things over these distances. Or maybe when we think that they're great at pacing, what we're actually seeing is that they're just physiologically more suited to the distance at times. Better at fatigue resistance. Yeah. So OK, I thought of three different things. Two are serious. One is a joke. Can I tell you? OK, I want to hear. OK, first one is that the fat metabolism point you made is more evolutionary. So how do you hack these evolutionary systems? We've talked about ketones on here. Would ketones for male athletes put them in more of a position where their bodies have some of these principles? Possibly. Possibly. Second one is related to training. So since the average man is trying to optimize for these variables, would it help the average man to do slightly more easy volume in Z1, really low level volume? Whereas the average woman doesn't necessarily need to do that. So should we think about that training to just increase the volume as much as we can to try to make some of these properties a little bit more efficient? Yeah, I like that. I close on that, actually. Yeah. And then my final one is only partially serious. It is related to me. It's that after I saw you give birth, I've been a lot tougher. And so does every man just need to see birth? Does that just make you tougher by association? We should just, I feel like we see it all the time in sex ed. We should just bring it to real life. From a young age, we'd have much, much stronger, robust adult humans. Yeah, I mean, to be semi-serious here, there are studies that show that if you electrically stimulate a woman's muscle in general, it'll be slightly less fattigable than a man's muscle. And that could have some evolutionary background and things like that. And then you think about you in pregnancy, or your childbirth. There's a 60-hour process. That's an ultra process. Whereas my physiology just needs to eat free does and nap. No, you need to eat free does and run from a lion, evolutionarily. Yeah, or whatever, or whatever else men do. And so I don't know, it actually is kind of interesting. I felt way tougher since I saw that experience. And I think part of it is almost a refraining of what hard actually is. So semi-serious, semi-not. It's fascinating. And the other point that I bring into is pain processing. And the research is really mixed. Like there are some studies that say that men process pain better than women. And other studies that say that women process pain better than men and type of pain and chronicity of pain. But I think that's another avenue of research, too, that will just continue to increase. Yeah. OK. Moving on from those studies, I want to highlight some two recent, very interesting, super shoes studies. So these are fascinating because they're taking the world by start. Obviously, everyone's wearing them in road marathons. We've talked about wearing them in road workouts. They're causing times to skyrocket across the board. They're also now in trail running. I wear my Hoketectons all the time. There's plates in so many shoes. So we want to talk a little bit about some of the recent science. And the benefits of them, also drawbacks of them. Yeah. And I think it's really interesting. People are responding to them quite differently. So there was a 2023 study that came out in sports medicine called the variability in running economy of Kenyan world class and European amateur male runners with advanced footwear running. And what they found was interesting. So runners were not responding to super shoes, like the same, different brands of super shoes in the same way. And I think we've known this intuitively. So like the shoes have been coined the quote unquote, 4% shoes, but 4% is just an average. Yeah. Like we have some people that get 0% from them and some people that get 8% from them. And it's usually more like 2% and 6% 0 and 8% are kind of the big tails. But not everyone responds to super suits the same way. Yeah. And this study, I honestly am a little skeptical seeing the numbers because I'm like, this seems too big. Yeah. So it took seven world class canyons in seven amateur elite or amateur European runners. For perspective, these canyons were sub one hour, half marathoners. So we're talking about some of the fastest people that have ever lived. And it took a regular training flat, so like a non-super shoe, and then three different brands, super shoes. Not sure which ones they are. You can look at the study. I was looking at the stack heights and trying to guess. And then I was like, it's just speculation. Why should I even do that? But here's the fascinating part. For the Kenyan runners, it ranged from an 11.3% drawback for one athlete with one shoe. Which is huge. Which is huge to an 11.4% benefit for another shoe. Whereas the European runners range from a 9.7% benefit to a 1.1% drawback. That is a insane range. And the percentage is indicated for the shoes that the super shoes were beneficial across the board. But it points out that that 4% number or whatever percent we want to use is a gross oversimplification. And it makes you think, like, hey, like we talked about with the gels, test what works for you. Because you could actually be bouncing backwards, I guess, is basically what the study is saying. And I think a really helpful way to do it is to get on a treadmill and measure your heart rate and measure to look at how efficient you're becoming in these shoes. And kind of get baseline measurements on yourself. So interesting. As we said with the nutrition, fuck around and find out. See what happens in super shoes. I mean, it's hard because it's like super shoes are expensive. So this could be a $1,000 experiment if you're trying at like four different types of super shoes. But it might be worth it. Or even see, like, sometimes running shoes, running shoe stores have treadmills. And you can go and try it out and bring your hurry monitor. Or at least try it with the one shoe that you're trusting. Yeah, exactly. It's super easy to test. Essentially, the protocol I would use is like a 20-minute, very easy warm-up. So you're not having any heart rate drifts. Stay hydrated. And then one day, do essentially five minutes at, you know, just do like a reverse trial study. So do one shoe followed by one shoe on a day where you have, like, a sustained pace. And then a few days later, do the reverse. And see if you do find any percentage change. Most likely, you're not going to see much of a difference because there's other variables that overlap. Just make sure you're not one of the people that's a 10% negative drawback. Because seeing that, I'm like, fuck, that is wild. And something I thought we never would see. It's super wild. I also wonder, too, if the treadmill biomechanics changed a little bit. So biomechanics are slightly altered on the treadmill. And perhaps like the interaction of like the carbon plate and the treadmill makes it hard. But this was eye-opening to me. Yeah. And I think like, you know, also feet are different. Try different things. See what happens. Yeah, definitely. And that gets back to the next study, which was also in sports medicine in 2023, called bone stress injuries in runners using carbon plate footwear. And this was based off of five case reports of athletes who got bone stress injuries after wearing carbon plate to choose. And it's really hard, again, we're getting to the idea that, like, it's hard to exactly draw the line of causation. They say the carbon plate to choose caused the bone stress injury. But given the profiles, they kind of speculated that they did. And it's really interesting to think about those. Yeah. And we've seen that too. So like, navicular in particular or tailless. Basically, your foot bones that are not used to this type of spring action through them, if you use them in training all the time, it could cause an increased injury risk. So make sure you're paying attention. I would say if you're going to be using the shoes, continually strengthen your feet. Don't use them exclusively. Use them strategically. And keep monitoring the fact that they do change your biomechanics because they're delivering more energy than the human foot is designed to deliver. And when you deliver more energy through a bone, especially in different patterns, that could cause stress injuries, whether those are soft tissue or, in this case, bone injuries. It's kind of fascinating that we're talking about this because I've been giving you deep shit for the last couple of months because you wear hoe contactons every day. And I'm like, yo, this is a stress fracture we're waiting to happen or some sort of like overuse injury because I tell athletes it's like two days max in carbon plate to choose. Two days a week max, yeah. So I've changed from, I don't wear hoe contactons every day anymore. I just wear them for my trail days. And then on the other days, I wear Saucony endorphin speed threes, which also have a plate. So they have a nylon plate though. How would you compare the nylon plate to the carbon plate? I mentioned it's the same problem. Yeah. You're still having the spring effect. And the stiffness through the midfoot. You know? Yeah. So this study had some interesting x-rays of the shoes on people's feet. Oh, this was actually my second, this x. So figure one in this study was the x-ray that you're talking about. So they took x-rays of people's feet and they had the carbon plate to chew on. And it was like, oh my gosh, it was like another G spot. It was so cool. I was like, that's genius to think about that. But they could see where the carbon plate and the curvature of the carbon plate overlaid the metatarsals. I thought it was very cool. So pay attention to this. Make sure you keep strengthening your feet. If you remember on a recent podcast, we talked about short bouts of barefoot running. I do two to five minutes, most days after my runs on the treadmill just with socks on. And so that type of thing works doing foot circles, doing foot stretching, making sure that you're not just fully relying on the shoes without subsequent biomechanical support. Okay, next big topic here. This study is freaking amazing and I missed it when it came out. This is on, quote, talent in genetics. Very quick overview of this. It was a 2018 study in nature. And essentially people were told that their actual genetic risk, or they were randomly assigned to receive either a high risk or a projected genetic risk for obesity and other variables. And then they had them do endurance tests. And what they found is the athletes were told, that were told erroneously that they were high risk for some variable performed worse on the endurance tests. And I think it points out that a lot of what we can see of as, quote, talent is essentially what we think our talent is, especially at the margins when we're talking about a few percent here and there. So gotta optimize what you think of yourself and put that into practice. And this gets back to our theory of testing the O2 Max. So we don't actually encourage our athletes to get their V O2 Max tested unless there's someone that's really into the data and has the psychological capabilities to handle that. But we're like, assume your V O2 Max is 100 and operate under those conditions. And I think it brings to me, like for me in medicine and coaching, it's like, I only want to do tests unless there's some sort of action or intervention that will take from that information. And I think with V O2 Max testing, like there often isn't. Like we're training, we're gonna continue training optimally in the way that we would independent of V O2 Max test. So it's like, why do it? And I think the same goes for, you know, basically all other tests. Yeah, so like, you know, what you said, assume your V O2 Max is 100 and operate accordingly. I would say do the same with almost every variable that you're not immediately causing training shifts on. Yes, yeah, exactly. And it's a learn process that takes time. But like, one of the big changes I've made this winter is like, I'm a dad now, I only have a certain amount of time to pursue my elite athletics. And I do not want my brain to hold back any of that. So I am never gonna give up on myself. I am always going to do the extra interval that I'm assigned. Every little thing, not because I want to or anything, but because I don't want to leave any stone unturned. And similarly, it's like, I've decided that, you know what, I'm just gonna, my talent's off the charts and I'm gonna fucking rock it. So it sounds like that's the reason you're running well, not saying you get birth. As you talked about earlier in the episode. Yeah, that'll stick with me for a long time. Stick with me for a long, long time. Okay, and the final one here is, Megan can give David shit now is what I called it in our outline, which was a study on artificial sweeteners that just came out in nature. You may have read about this because I think it has relevance far outside athletics. It's pretty interesting stuff. Also in nature, so nature is like the pinnacle of scientific publications. And they had so many steps in this study that it was again, a little overwhelming as a researcher. I was like, wow, it should really be 10 papers. It's great. Yeah, nature studies always, I'm like, I just get tired thinking about them. I'm like, This was so many steps. Because they do the intervention and then they prove some sort of causation. And then they do another in another, and another. And then they start testing it on mice. And I'm like, oh, I just want to take a nap. I can't get over there for my good night kiss right now. It's far too far. But there's like 10 different methodological steps supporting why I should give you shit. In nature, it came out. So the sweetener, eerithritol, their finding might be linked to cardiovascular and cardiomel metabolic defects, which is really interesting because you're connoisseur. I would say you're a connoisseur are fake sugars. You like fake sugars. I mean, I like all sugar. And I result a lot of sweet things have fake sugars in them. I'm not like seeking them out necessarily, but I do like to chew my gum and do a lot of protein shakes and things like that. So basically to summarize the study a lot, they're looking at people over the age of 60. There's a lot of comorbidities here. They tried to isolate for them all, but it's not something that applies to everyone. We're not saying that fake sugars are bad across the board. Make sure you don't take that away from it. But do I would say choose the option with sugar if you have that option. Anytime you see that, like whether it's a coch or a diet coch, choose the coch, it is going to probably be better for your health. And I think getting back to the study, so what they found was that erythritol was associated. And again, as you mentioned, it was individuals age 60 and older. And they actually, these individuals had some sort of cardiovascular disease risk. So it's not exactly like our general population and probably not the athletic population that we're speaking to, but they did find that it was related to, you know, cardiovascular events, including clots, strokes and heart attack, which is really interesting. But they also had an in vitro model too that looked at erythritol and they found enhanced platelet reactivity. So like platelet clumping together, which could explain some of the clots. But I think for me, it's kind of hard to say that, oh my gosh, this is something that we should all get up in arms about. But I've been skeptical of fixed triggers for a long time. And it's like, why choose them? Yeah. And also there's studies on reds and under-feeling and things that find that the people that choose the zero calorie beverages have much worse issues with our hormonal systems than people that choose full calorie beverages, even when you control for daily energy intake. So we don't know exactly what we're seeing here. And like... I think the moral of the story is like, don't panic. Don't panic. Yeah, like I think for me, it's like, erythritol is in a lot of protein powders. And I think the benefit that you're going to get from protein actually outweighs the potentially very, very small risk of erythritol. But I think also like, don't go consuming 12 diet cokes a day. Yeah. I think it's a great lesson there. Yeah. And also maybe pay attention to the exact type of artificial sweetener. Like I haven't seen any study like this yet on Stevie R or whatever, which is... Oh, I think they're coming. They're coming. They're coming. Nature 2025. I am always like kind of scared when I look at like a thing of Stevia. So I was reading about it and like the powdered Stevia that you get or whatever. It's only a very, very small percentage of Stevia. It's otherwise just filler. And if you use the smallest bit of that, it freaking overwhelms the palette. It is like the sweetest shit on earth. And it also is not digested by the body. It's probably not good, or at least might have some issues, particularly if you're like over 60 and have pre-existing conditions. It's like the vitamin D dropper where like you put a full milliliter of Stevia into something and you're like, what is happening right now? Exactly. So just pay attention to that. But make sure you still, you know, don't overthink your nutrition in any fashion. Okay. We're moving on to the big training topic, but first, wanted to mention this feedback on the Patreon episode we did this past week because we want you to sign up for our Patreon. Patreon.com slash swap. We've been having so much fun on Patreon and I think it kind of gets this listener's email that I'm going to read. This is from someone who subscribes our Patreon. I wrote spam. Please don't feel like you need to reply, but I just wanted to say today was my first Patreon lesson. And my God, you guys are so, so good in this format. I listened to the standard swap on the weekly and I love it. But the Patreon version where you guys are relaxed and free flowing is so damn good. Can I pay you more? Have a great weekend. Wouldn't it be funny if I just made up that email? It does sound like it's like straight from marketing 101. But yeah, on Patreon, we do weekly bonus episodes that are really fun that are 30 minutes and have a bit different vibe than this. We're very relaxed on this episode. I don't know if it's like the Friday afternoon vibe or what, but we chillin'. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about the G-spot here. You can only imagine what we're talking about there. And then also we- The next spot. Triple X. And then also we do weekly science corner posts. I think the one last week is on a topic that's related to what we're going to get into now and is really important. And so that is for the top tier there. Okay, so the Patreon question of the week, which might be a new segment, might not, is this. I'm going to be tracking my intensity distribution throughout the week by entering in my time spent in zone one and zone two and my time spent in zone three and above and have it all run through a fun Google Sheets equation. Why I love my spreadsheets. And I get to see if I'm generally following the 80-20 rule. If I run up hills on some easy days and make them more easy slash moderate, I will obviously have a little more time in zone three and above on those easy days. If that time running up hills makes my percentage in zone three or above go up significantly throughout the week. Should I scale back on the time spent doing workouts? Or should I tell my rule following brain to chill the fuck out and take the 80-20 idea more loosely? Thank you. This person's creating some spreadsheet porn. That's great. Yeah, it's amazing. And it gets to the, I think, heart of training. And when they're talking about 80-20, what they mean there is that 80% of your training should be easy in zone one or zone two for this athlete and 20% should be above that in zone three or higher. And we're going to get into why it's complicated, where those issues come from, and that sexy, sexy figure three. Oh, we're getting the figure three. Also, it gets the idea. I feel like rules should always be broken, especially in training. It's like, you know, everything is, it kind of gets the 4% idea is that we're all regressing to a mean. And so there's no reason that it always has to be this exact 80-20% distribution. Yeah. And I think what's so awesome is that the study we're about to get into talks about the different mechanisms at play and how sometimes they're pulling in the opposite direction. So when we say 80-20, 80-20 can be great. 90-10 can also be great. But what Norwegians are showing is sometimes 60 or 70, 30 to 40 can be fantastic if you intensity control. And I think it points out that training is a complicated art, and that art is all related to the science, which we are going to detail from a 2023 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Interesting journal choice. Oh, I was going to say interesting journal for an exercise physiology article. I like it. They're like, let's get it out there. But they really should have been more selected because this is the best figure three of all time. And the other thing I would say about this article was does lactate gutted threshold interval training within a high volume, low intensity approach represent the next step in the evolution of distance running training? Yeah. And so essentially it's more like an essay. Honestly, I would say you should all read this because it's not a control study. It's like a narrative review. Yeah. Narrative review of everything that's happened in training theory and in studies up to this point and trying to explain why we're seeing athletes progress so fast and why people like us talk about threshold so much. So do you want to do a quick training zone breakdown? Yeah. I've done this before on podcasts, but I feel like it's going to anchor this whole discussion so we can do it again. So we'll go into the research zones and then the zones that we classically use in training models such as Garmin, Strava, or as coaches think about it. Definitely. So the problem here is that in research, there's just three zones. That's sort of ease of quantification. It's all based on some of the lactate principles we're going to get to later. But they overlap with the five zone model that you might know of. So first, research zone one is zone one and zone two in the training models. Basically this just means easy running up to steady running. And that's in a research is just all in one box of low intensity, which is kind of convenient. I want to apply the research to how we think about coaching. Yeah. I like it a lot more. But I think for sometimes for athletes, it's really challenging to stay in zone one or zone two on hills. And this is where trainers I find often are creeping into the research zone two or zones three and four. And so one helpful test, I think it's getting on a treadmill, saying it to 15% and recognizing just how easy it feels when you're running and then looking down your heart rate and being like, oh, it actually might be a little bit higher than I think it is. Yeah. And once people start wearing lactate monitors, they realize they start producing lactate so much earlier than they think, which as we're going to talk about has major biochemical implications for your body. How would you describe what it feels like to produce lactate in those early stages? Because in the end stages, lactate and we're going to get into like a breakdown of more of what lactate is. But oftentimes athletes can feel that burn. There's this really classic feeling. But early on, there's kind of gradations of producing lactate. What does that feel like? You know, I find that all of the tests are a little bit wishy-washy. Like, you'll often hear the talk test used for when you start to hit your tempo zone or something like that, where you can only get off a few words. I'm like, if I'm with a good friend, if I'm with Drew Holman, I can talk so much. It's so easy to talk. So what I always try to think is when you start to feel just a little bit of resistance, that's almost always going to correspond with more lactate production. You're probably leaving your aerobic threshold unless your body's just really tired from life or training. As you say, I think my talk zones are heavily correlated to the running buddies I'm running with. Like with you, David, my talk zone start and like, we're pretty silent when we train. It's kind of nice. It's like a meditative relationship between the two of us. But with other friends, I'm like, I can talk its own time. I don't really bring the perceived exertion benefits that other friends do. Let's be honest. Okay. So next up is research zone two. This is classified generally as moderate training. This is zone three and zone fours in the training model. Basically we're talking tempo here. The big recent advance is that lactate monitors are flying off the shelves to see when people hit this zone because basically what this zone is, it's where lactate is produced and cleared at similar rates. You hit lactate LT2 at the top of this, which we often call regular lactate threshold. And we'll get into the mechanics of lactate ahead because that's really fun to think about what is lactate shuttling and what does that actually mean. I think sometimes the word itself isn't actually intuitive for the actual processes that are happening inside the body. Yeah. And there's also some disagreement about where the top end of this zone is. Some people say it's lactate threshold, which might be considered one hour effort. Other people say it's like critical velocity or critical power, which is a little bit more intense. It really depends. We're not really interested too much in the exact gradations there. There's about 18 different terms to describe the same thing. So just pick your flavor and roll with it. Yes. Basically throughout, assume that we're putting in 25 disclaimers for every single thing we're saying, because each one involves its own scientific paper that itself is highly debated. In fact, while we were researching for this discussion, I came across a number of opposing viewpoints that were their own articles, refuting previous articles. So in other words, there's things to refute everything we're saying. This is kind of debated, but we're going to try to bring it all together at the end. Meanwhile, I went down a 20 minute rabbit hole wondering if it was mitochondria proliferation or biogenesis. I'll get to it ahead. So there's lots of terms. Yes. Lots going on with those powerhouses of the cell mitochondria. And then finally, we have research zone three. This is considered high intensity training zone five plus in the training based models. Essentially, we're talking shorter intervals here, your VO2 stuff, your very fast, shorter things. And then the key of these zones is that they're all hinged on lactate. So I think before we take the next step into thinking about how our bodies are working through these zones and what are the physiological underpinnings of these zones, let's do a little primer on lactate. So lactate is a complex process, but overall, it produces our bodies use glucose to fuel ATP production during glycolysis, which is a mouthful. But essentially that means it's a fuel source for cells. And we say this all the time on year, but lactate itself is not the boogie man. Lactate is accompanied by a hydrogen ion. And that changes the muscle peach and contributes to that like burning feeling that we associate with fatigue. Well, we need to this shirt that says lactate is not the boogie man. Oh, I would love it. We say it all the time. And it doesn't actually matter too much about the exact biochemistry you're dealing with here because once we put it into practice with training, it all kind of fits together. But I think it's important to understand this because otherwise athletes will be like, oh, shouldn't I hammer every single interval? And as we're going to see in the 2023 study, we're going to talk about in a minute, that's actually the opposite of what athletes are doing at the elite level nowadays. And the reason is because lactate is not the boogie man, but if you produce a fuck ton of it, you're going to overwhelm the lactate shuttling mechanism. And when you do that, you get less efficient aerobically, your mitochondria, the progliferate less, there's less biogenesis. And it kind of leads to this house of cards where you're able to run faster short term, but your aerobic system might actually be eroding from its ultimate potential. And I think the best way to summarize this actually is through someone else's words. It's good there's someone who's a lot smarter than me. So Dr. Howard Lux. No, wait first. I have to jump in there. No one is smarter than you. That is impossible. Thank you for the coach, heavy points. But Dr. Howard Lux, he summarized a 2018 study in Salmatabolism. And this study was called the science and translation of lactate shuttle theory. So he took this study and several other principles and gave us a little snippet about what happens during lactate shuttling. So I'm going to read this because he explained this so beautifully and it's better than I can do. Yeah, well, I actually think this article that he wrote is one of the best on this subject I've ever read. Like, it's so simple, so direct. And this little like snippet that we're bringing out here is just a small thing of a broader picture. So go read this article if you can find it. And he wrote, and when glycolysis is performed without oxygen or anaerobically, the byproduct of this process is pyruvate, which being turned into lactate. Lactate-like fit athletes can use the pyruvate as fuel, thus decreasing the amount that can turn into lactate. Lactate can be returned to the mitochondria and fit individuals via a lactate shuttle, enabling lactate to be utilized as fuel. The more fit we are, the more lactate we can shuttle back into the mitochondria to use this fuel. The lactate pyruvate shuttle plays a role in helping fuel the production of the ATP that powers our muscles when we exercise, and mitigates the issues of exhaustion that occur when lactate concentrations are too high. First, I wish our listeners could see what you were doing with your hands. I was wildly just stickulating. You look like Lydia Tar there, just conducting an orchestra as you were reading. I was conducting the mitochondria. Let's proliferate them everywhere. Tar, by the way, is a movie I haven't seen that is nominated for Best Picture, but I've read some snippets of it, and it sounds fucking horrible. It sounds like everyone's like, this is a miserable movie, but it's Best Picture Nominee. So basically what that's talking about is that we're not just saying, how can you produce a ton of lactate? We're saying, how can you use the lactate you're producing and have it correspond to higher outputs? And the 2023 study that just came out is what I think the big question of it is what training approach optimizes this lactate shuttling system? Because it's not just about lactate, right? It's not just about this shuttle. It's also about oxidative capacity of your muscle fibers. The muscle fibers strengthen themselves. Your red blood cells and how that interacts with the whole process. So there's so many variables at play, and we're just going to get into a few of them that have implications before we get to the big old sexy figure three. I'm so excited about this. And I think for me, when I first heard lactate shuttle when I was just getting into coaching, I was thinking about lactate being cleared. I was like, oh, we're just like shuttling lactate away. But I felt like this explanation really helped for me understand and ground the idea that no lactate is being shuttled into using it as a fuel source. It's not just being cleared away. Yeah. It's kind of like a recycling bin. Yeah, right. You know, because often when I throw things in a recycling bin, I'm like, that's just getting, that's going to be just tossed in the landfill. And what they're saying is no, this isn't going to the landfill. This is going to be turned into more sexy plastic bottles or something. It's like tossing plastic bottles and throw a cycling bin and have a flower grow. Yeah, exactly. New mitochondrial proliferation via flowers, daisies. Exactly. Okay. So the first factor at play that we want to talk about are muscle fibers. So this is a quote from the 2023 study. Type one, slow twitch muscle fibers find increased capacity for the oxidative metabolism through mitochondrial biogenesis and capitalization. And that's relevant to type two, which are the faster twitch muscle fibers, because the quote, the mosaic architecture of human skeletal muscle dictates that increased capitalization in the slow twitch muscle fibers also serves to augment oxygen delivery in the faster twitch muscle fibers. So the basic summary is that controlled intensity training improves slow twitch muscle fiber performance and makes those type two muscle fibers that we all have to some proportion act more like slow twitch, which is what you want for endurance performance. We want a lot of slow twitch muscles coming to the party. Yeah. So this is really helpful because athletes like doing higher volume, lower intensity training, you can see the pathway in which the muscles over many, many periods of years are starting to act more slow twitch. Yeah. I think for David, David, for you, that's been something that's been really helpful in your athletic journey. Yeah. I think about it all the time. So there's some really fascinating twin studies in this area where twins are like that are separated at birth and have different life trajectories. One will do endurance training. One won't. And they'll have the one that's done endurance training will have so much more slow twitch muscle fiber expression. They more than you would assume based on these closed physiological models. And I'm always motivated by that because as I'm training, I think back to when I was a sprinter and I know I was faster twitch and now I've done all this endurance training. And I'm out on a long run with Drew Holman this weekend and we're going up hills at the end of this 22 mile or an all of a sudden I'm like, fuck, is this what it feels like? Is this what it feels like to be slower twitch? So I feel like I'm having this process unfold through 16 years of hard endurance work and I'm very curious to see where it goes from here, but I think it applies to everyone. If you just keep putting those bricks in the wall, you'll find endurance that you didn't know you have through I think mainly this muscle fiber explanation. But there are other pathways too. And that's what I really like about this overarching paper is that they summarize all the different pathways and also bring together how they're being utilized at the same time. So in addition to muscle fibers, we are getting to now the mitochondria. Finally, the powerhouse of this cell and what we think about so mitochondria proliferation or biogenesis, whatever word you wanted to use like my 20 minute rabbit hole, you can do either is really important and training impacts mitochondria proliferation and different intensities of training through different signaling pathways impact how much mitochondria is being produced. So there's a calcium signaling pathway that aids in mitochondria production and also a pathway called the NPK pathway. The calcium signaling pathway gets turned on or activated with higher volume and lower intensity training, whereas the NPK pathway gets turned on or activated with higher intensity training. But what's really cool and this is like the money ball summary of the paper or not the summary, but it's like there's 18 different summaries. Yeah, but it's a lot of this. One of the key really cool parts of this paper is that the AMPK pathway gets saturated very easily. So if you're doing higher intensity training, there's a limitation to how much mitochondria proliferation you can have because that pathway gets saturated really easy. Whereas the calcium signaling pathway doesn't get saturated quite as easier. So you can do a lot of high-volume lower intensity training and see big gains from mitochondria. Okay, I just want to take a second to say, Megan, that was the best explanation I've ever heard. I feel like I finally understand this process way better than I ever did before. Well, for context, we have like one or two notes down on here. So I'm like, wild at just circulating in the air trying to get my, trying to get my thoughts to come to paper, but hopefully that was okay. Yeah. And there's a mediator called PGC1A or alpha or whatever. And so it gets really complicated of how the mitochondria proliferation actually works on the cellular level. But basically all you need to know is that low intensity training is what optimizes your total potential. But the high intensity training is needed to not leave some adaptations on the table. It just happens more rapidly. So get those, we talked about on here the backwards hat mitochondria. You know what, we have talked about that a lot and I forget how we have gotten to the backwards hat mitochondria, but it's really important, like proliferate those mitochondria, really helpful for long-term development. So when you're talking about running uphill easily with Drew, it's a lot of these different factors and systems coming together, not just muscle fiber typology. Yeah. And this isn't just running when we're talking high volume. This is also cross-training. It's other variables that basically any type of movement that you do can play into this, you know, calcium signaling pathway and can really matter. In fact, physiologist Alan Kuzens is a huge fan of like sometimes three hour walks and things in the context of his training. B.C. is like he theorizes it helps with like fat oxidation in these processes. Next two are very quickly, we'll do a scover these quickly, is inflammation. So you can imagine higher intensity creates more inflammation. You see that in things like cortisol readings on blood work. The next one, I guess, would be the nervous system. Higher intensity messes a little bit more with autonomic nervous system. There's some really fascinating studies that have come out recently on heart rate variability that finds that low intensity training actually improves heart rate variability, even at relatively high volumes. Like once athletes are getting really far up there, and I think that shows that the low intensity stuff is not what causes overtraining, is not what causes that fatigue athletes to get. The problem is when they start creeping up into research zone two, research zone three, without even realizing it, or they're just doing too many workouts. I do think it takes an adaptation to the higher volume low intensity training. Like I think you're not going to see those HRV gains in the first week or two. I think it takes stacking those up over time and allowing the body to adapt. One curious thing though, so as we're going through these different systems, one thing that was missing in the overall research summary of this article that we're putting together and reviewing is that they didn't talk about musculoskeletal output across these different systems. I think as we're thinking about lower intensity training versus higher intensity training, musculoskeletal output I think is really important because for elite athletes you couldn't have that naturally because elite athletes are able to put out pretty high musculoskeletal output at lower intensities. But for athletes like me, you were coming back to this part and I'm totally untrained. My musculoskeletal output is so low that I have to think about intensity distribution in a little bit of a different way. We'll get into that ahead. I think it's also a system to think about and toss into this overall summary. I think it's really relevant as athletes age in particular and musculoskeletal power starts to decrease a ton. This training system that we're talking about today has been optimized for, let's be honest, 25 year old men. That's a very different cohort than most of our listeners and most people that are training. We'll get into some of those complications. Now we finally wanted to bring it all together in a training summary that features Figure 3. Figure 3, we made it. I felt like this entire time it was like, are we getting there? Are we going to do it? I don't know. The feelings have been building. It feels like we're walking a physiological tightrope. These every time we say something, I'm just like, David, don't fuck this up because Megan is absolutely rocking it. It's like physiological foreplay. It's like I've been waiting. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. And let's insert into Figure 3 with first. It's broken down into the three research zones. So we're going to start with low intensity training. This is zone one, zone two in the training model. Basically you can imagine more calcium signaling equals more mitochondria, more oxygen delivery to working skeletal muscles, more capitalization, and just more oxidative capacity generally. The training takeaways that the authors had were that most athletes are doing one long run per week that is mostly easy with continuous runs 20 to 100 minutes otherwise. And so lots of easy training. This doesn't have to just be running. You can get on the bike. You can go on hikes. You can do elliptical. Basically whatever gets you into those lower zones is helpful. And then they outlined. So after low intensity training, they outlined threshold intensity, which is zone three or four in the coaching training theory models and zone two in the research model. And that's the big sexy one for the Norwegians and stuff. I was going to say this is the meat and potatoes of the figure. This is the broccoli and cheddar in our lives. This is the like, I think this is the bulk of what we think about as we get into training nuances and complexities. So at Threshold Intensity, we start thinking more about AMP K signaling. So that was a signaling pathway that I was talking about that does get saturated pretty quickly but does good things for mitochondria proliferation and biogenesis. So it's fun to think about it within the context of this. Also at Threshold Intensity, we're starting thinking about better nervous system recruitment. So some of the neuromuscular output benefits that we get from training as well as stroke volume increases too. And then also just thinking about like, I think this is where they actually probably are touching a little bit on like musculoskeletal output here. But they talk about the idea that we're also like maximizing motor unit recruitment here. But not having necessarily like the negative inflammatory profiles of doing much harder, higher intensity training like we'll see in Zone 5. Yeah, definitely. And this is where the lactate shuttle really starts to come into play. Because as you tickle that lactate shuttle. Tickling the lactate shuttle, look at you. It just starts giggling. And the shuttle is just giggling every time you're in this zone. So as long as you're not overdoing it, they find that the shuttle itself can get way, way stronger. And because lactate is produced at almost all intensity levels, whether you're running one mile or a hundred miles or whatever, that's why this type of zone helps whether you're doing really short stuff like Jacob Ingebritzen or really long stuff like Gustav Iden would be doing in the Ironman. This helps at every single level. So the takeaway they had that these athletes are doing are 8 to 12 kilometer sessions of intervals that are broken up by 30 to 90 seconds recovery. And this is where things like the double threshold sessions come in and things like that. We're not saying that athletes should do that. We're just saying that these controlled intensity intervals are where the magic of the lactate shuttle and the AMPK signaling happen. And so you just need to feed it back in with a third category in figure three, higher intensity in moderation. So higher intensity is for the neuromuscular system, for biomechanical system and for musculoskeletal output. These are almost always going to be short intervals. Make sure you're not doing like eight minute hard intervals into this zone because you're just going to be inefficient and it's going to make you soar and tired and take away from some of the other adaptations. That's kind of the magic of training theory. In the old days in the 1990s, US runners were just going out and hammering mile repeats as hard as they could. No one does that anymore. They're doing mile repeats, relaxed, controlled, and then increasing their output on things like 200s, hill strides, short intervals, things like that. I think this is how we've evolved through training theory. I think if we could have a podcast abstract that we're taking away from this episode, our main conclusion would be tickle the lactate mechanism. I think in the early 90s, we were just hammering it and it's really about delicately tickling it. The hard part is in studies, if you just do a ton of high intensity, those athletes will get way better really fast. That's a great point. You're not even coaching. Those athletes will get way better really fast. Oh, give Tabata's 30-30s. And athletes excel off that, especially untrained athletes or early in the development athletes. But apply that long term over months and years. You're not going to see the same development. Yeah, but you still do it. What they're pointing out is that even though these athletes have lower intensity training for the most part, they're often doing one sprint interval session per week, which will classify as harder strides, things like 150 meters, and then one VO2 session per week, which they often do 20 by 200 meter hills. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. So this isn't just everyone's going easy all the time. They're also layering down and producing some lactate when it's time to do so. So I think now would be really helpful time to transition into some problems that I think are outlined in this. So they don't necessarily talk about musculoskeletal output. And that's what kind of alluding to you. This model is designed for 25-year-old male athletes. So what happens for aging athletes, for female athletes, for athletes just getting into sport? How do we think about these training principles and adapt them? And I think that that's a really hard point, and it gets into the question about hills. This type of thing requires you to do a fuck ton of flat intervals. I can't do the style of training, like double thresholds, tons of threshold intervals. My body breaks down so fast. From an injury risk perspective, or just how you feel? A little bit of both. I want to say that I'm a tough as nails guy because I have seen you give birth. You're tough as nails. But when I'm doing it, I'm just like, dude, this is a little hot. And so what I found is that doing some of these on the treadmill, uphill, limits that impact. But even then, I just can't really do double thresholds in a structured way without using uphills. And what about aging athletes? Also an open question about whether this works for female athletes as we talked about before. And the final complication is if you're doing lactate controlled training theoretically, but aren't doing lactate testing, are you actually doing lactate controlled training? I think you are. Because I think it's all about the principles. I don't necessarily think the body works on the strict inflection point theories out there. It's just kind of convenience of measuring. But it would help most if you used lactate monitoring all the time, like the Norwegians do. Well, I think sometimes perfect is the enemy of good. And all you need to do is good to lactate tickling. You need to do it perfectly. Just good. That's a good lesson. That also goes for the dating advice we gave her. Right. You're putting yourselves out there in the relationship. You don't need to be great at tickling. Just very gentle. Just gentle. Just gentle. And honest. Perfect. Okay. So now getting back to the question, enter Hills. And I think that this is kind of the magic of some of our training theory and how we've developed it based on these principles. We're not giving athletes humongous threshold workouts all the time, especially things like double thresholds, especially pros. Like it's just not feasible. I don't think that there's very many athletes that can handle that. The ones that can, you know, and they're basically world class. But Hills provide an amazing opportunity, as we were talking about with a treadmill test, to get up into threshold without any impact. So you could be doing Norwegian style breakdowns and you can be harnessing the principles in the study, the MPK pathway and things, but without breaking down your body without the inflammation responses. This is huge. Can I ask you a hypothetical question? Yeah. Actually. So if we had a runner that we knew, we had a crystal ball and we knew that they were bullet proof and they were trail and ultra runner, would you rather take the approach of doing double thresholds and, you know, ideal lactate clearance based workouts on flats? Or would you introduce Hills in there? I mean, I think both have their advantages, but you know the athlete's not going to get injured. What would you do? Yeah. I would do Hills still. Yeah, I would do. And just because like the motor unit recruitment is different and I think that it will allow us to translate better when we get to actual trails. For road runners, yeah, I'd just be flat. I think. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I would mix some. I mean, I would probably do like every third or every fourth workout mixed Hills. And because I think the power stimulus is still really helpful for those athletes. But I think it's prominently false. Yeah. But even with the Norwegians, the short power intervals are often done on Hills. Yeah, exactly. So they're getting those stimulus that stimulus. Yeah. So any point out how it works. Okay. So basic principle here is that uphills lead to a higher aerobic stress without the higher mechanical stress. Mm hmm. And let's just put it into practice with an actual number based detail and both involve our favorite boy, Drew Holman. Drew the best. Drew is the greatest. So on a run with Drew the other week, I was at 141 average heart rate. That's 645 pace. So for me, that is in the very end, low end of my Z two, maybe the high end of my Z one. And that is kind of fast, right? To get up into my Z three or Z four, I would need to be running really fast. I'd need to be running probably five 30s, five 20s, maybe in five minutes. And that for me feels just like breakdown city, even in my 30s now, like in maybe in my mid twenties, it wouldn't have felt that way, but it does now. Meanwhile, on a long run with Drew this weekend, I averaged 161 heart rate for a one-hour climb where it honestly felt like we were just chilling the whole time. But you guys are thrown down. I mean, you rock some Strava segment out there. I'm going to brag on your behalf. But the basic principle being like by letting your heart rate just drift up when you're going uphill like that, I got a really great threshold workout. If we looked at that threshold workout on paper, it would essentially look like five by 10 minutes, let's say, with a couple of few minutes, easy recovery, whether he'll backed off or it went downhill. But what it felt like to me was just a chill run with my bro. And to do that on flats, I would need to hammer it and I would be sore for days. So it points out that these hills are an opportunity, I think, for everyone in their training because they can get up into these threshold zones without the inflammation response, without the nervous system issues, and get some of the benefits that the Norwegians are talking about. Okay, one more question for you. Sorry, I'm just peppering up with questions. What goes up must come down. So I mean, unless you have a gondola or, you know, you're getting picked up at the top, which we've done before, it's really fun to orchestrate that. So you're planning a one way run in two weeks and I'm so excited to pick you up. But you do have to come downhill. So how do you account for that? And the fact that like, you know, you are having some biomechanical stimulus of, in this case with Drew, you ran down 3000 feet of hurt and you're hobbling around today. How do you account for that? You just call me out. My whimping right now. I think treadmill is a great way to do it where you're just going uphill. I also think that for the most part, we're just referring to this in the context of normal rolling runs or trail runs, the athletes are going to be doing anyway. Not saying like, this is a specific time where we need to go way up and way down. It's more like, hey, you're going to be running hills no matter what. Let's use them and let's think about how it fits in. And I actually think that's a great intro into the big takeaway here, which is if an athlete is just training on flats, if you want to optimize all of your physiology, like this study talks about, essentially you probably need to do two or three workouts per week every week. Some of those might even need to be double workouts. That's kind of what the Norwegians show. But if you're training on hills, two or three workouts a week will almost certainly overtrain you unless you're walking every single hill or really jogging because as we said, the heart rate gets up when you do that. Especially at altitude or in the heat or in other various environmental conditions. But what I love about hills, it's like a free workout. It's like when you're running trails on hills, it's like you got a Peloton instructor out there and you're just leaning into it. But I always find like for me running on hills, it feels easier than running on flats because it's like the mountain is doing some of the work for you and it's really fun to like literally and proverbially lean into that. I love it. What would you say to an athlete that is like running hills in their training? How should they think about this? Should they try to run more of the hills? Should they slow down? So it's all easy? How should they think about it? I like working structured hills into long run. So I often tell athletes like this is a great time to spend 30 minutes of the long run, whether that's segmented or one straight shot of a hill to spend time at half marathon effort, 50k effort. It kind of depends on the athlete and their level, the caliber what they're training for. But I work in some structured hill workouts. But I try to tell athletes like the more hills you can run training compared to hiking, the better. Yeah. And think about the question that we got about this person asking, should they run hills because they always get up into threshold? The answer is probably yes. Just back off your workouts so that your actual structured workouts are purely supportive. You might want to do like a VO2 style workout, like whether that's on hills or whatever to increase your mechanical output. But otherwise, if you're running a lot of hills and it gets your heart rate up like that, you're probably doing good intensity distribution and getting all the midochondrial biogenesis you need. And if you do more workouts, you're risking causing damage. So to athletes out there that are wondering, should I run this hill that maybe it would require me to hike or jog super duper slow to stay in the research zone line, so under aerobic threshold, my answer is try to run it. Yeah. We can adjust your other workouts accordingly to make sure that your intensity is still mostly easy and it's like the lower intensity training distribution. But those hills are huge opportunities. And I think what you'll find is you'll get way better. The principle of if you're going to hike a hill and a race, hike it in training, I think that's wrong because that caps the potential of the athlete. And the point being eventually you're going to be able to run more and more hills. And as you do that, much like the moderate intervals, improve your ability at one mile or 100 miles, you're going to improve your ability all over. And if you look at the Strava files and even some of our podcast interviews of the goats and swerve, you see like Courtney doing this, you see Kelly in doing this, you see Jim doing this. A lot of Jim's runs are just like he's going out and running in the hills, but you look at his whole times and you're like, yeah, that's fast. Yeah. So it's fascinating to see this like happen and play out in elite athletes training. Yeah, that's the maybe best point of all is that as you're thinking about this, if you're the type of athlete that runs hills, you don't need to get too far down into the weeds, us reading about mitochondrial biogenesis for 20 minutes and breaking our brains. You just need to understand that it's about intensity distribution. Most of your training should be easy and some should be moderate. That moderate training, as we're seeing in the trail goats, can just come from running up hills. It doesn't necessarily need to be these fancy scary workouts, though I think it's important to keep your max output high. So make sure you're doing strides, make sure you're doing things that keep that mechanical output going. And if you do that, you can simplify training theory, especially simplifying threshold training theory and get almost all of the benefits without the potential drawbacks that I think anyone's going to see that's not a 25 year old durable male. And what I think is really fun about this is like this training philosophy doesn't require going to the track and just hammering out mile repeats. It's like under this training system and this training system would be skewed for living in a flat place for training in the roads. But if you're thinking about this from a trail and ultra running perspective, just go run in the hills. Yeah. And stay fast. Yeah. Our basic approach is athletes that do hilly runs, especially for their long runs, will only do one really structured workout per week, maybe on the kind of Wednesday. And that's why you'll often see easy moderate or whatever. You can just go and run. And then we know you'll get a lot of threshold and we don't need to structure that. For maybe our elite road runners will do two workouts per week and have a little bit more leeway that way. So it'll be Wednesday workout, a Saturday workout and then an easy long run on Sunday where it might get up a little bit, but not so much. And that's basically all it is that I think it's much simpler than it sometimes feels when you read these complex training theories that get people to run Olympic gold medals. But I enjoy reading the complex. Oh, it's so good. Like I want to think about my next Java title is going to be tickling my lactate shuttle. Can we get a lactate monitor? I love one. Yeah, we should do it. Yeah, we should. Yeah, we should. I'm always like hesitant sometimes. Well, it's complicated because you have to like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, it's complicated because you have to like do the fingerprint and stop. We need to read it like a much better lactate monitoring system. Are you hesitant because it's blood? Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is actually it's great exposure therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure when you're at 180 heart rate, you're not going to care. Yeah. You're going to be like, here's my blood. Yeah. Yeah. I should be like, take it from my cartoid artery. Just chop it on her. You're going to keep that in because I want everyone to see. I have never heard it said, but I read it all the time. Well, you're so, I mean, you've probably read it more than I have. Okay. Do you have anything else to say on the topic? No, just tells her fun. That was really fun. I have a fun discussion. Yeah. If you made it to this point, if you made it through all that mitochondria talk, big kudos. Yeah, we love you. And also subscribe to our Patreon, www.jondecon.com slash swap. SVP. We gained a lot of really fun things. Okay. We have a few options for listener corner here. Let's just take the first one. Let's do the first one. That looks great. Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. David and Megan, thank you so much for being so awesome every week. I love the fact that swap is so positive and friendly for people of all body shapes and gender identities. It's become such a life affirming part of my week. You two rock. Oh, that's so amazing. I loved talking with Lauren Fleschman. Can we have her back on the podcast at some point? That would be so cool. I wonder if she would be like asking. I don't know. It's like, I feel bad asking her to do that maybe in a year. She seemed to enjoy it, but she also seemed to enjoy canceling plans. Yes. I don't want to ask her to play it yet. But yeah, on that specific topic about body shapes and gender identities, when we talk about these really complicated training principles, what we want you to know is no matter where you're coming from, it is for you. If you're someone out there that does 20 minute pace as your runs, hell yes. Let's think about these training principles and optimize your physiology because if you can get to 1930, that is an awesome journey. And same goes with things like body shapes and all that. We want this to be for everybody because the fun part is not in winning Olympic medal, honestly, because sometimes those people are depressed just as much as we are. The fun part is getting out there and being excited for seeing what you can do. So let's get excited and tickle some things. And same goes for mitochondria. We uplift and support all mitochondria shapes and sizes. Yeah. Yeah. If it's a little bit too bean shaped or like, I don't know, it has a big crick in it. You should probably see your dog. Okay. We love you all. Puss on. Bye. Okay. Thank you.