155. Hormones and Athletics, Ultra Legs Strength, and Improving Technical Running!

Woo-hoo. Welcome to some Work All Play podcast. We are so happy to have you with you today. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And the morning is so young on this Tuesday. We have so much day ahead of us. It is 5 a.m. in this recording studio. It's great. Why are we waking up so early? You know what my theory is? What? It's that it's the Ultra Legs Release Day. Oh yeah, that's why. We're just too excited. We've got to stand in line for 24 hours of the movie premiere. Exactly. So Ultra Legs is our big strength video that's finally coming out after four months of teasing. I don't know if it was worth four months of teasing now that it's out, but our Patreon crew at least seems to like it. So it'll be public for everybody this week. I think it's going to be a pretty big deal for some. I did it yesterday. I'm a little bit sore right now. I've got to be honest. Oh, I love how you called it our Ultra Legs video. I had nothing to do with this. I think there's a scene of me in the video. So it's David's video for solidness. 10 minutes, 12 minutes. It's 13 minutes. 13 minute long video. What an idiot. No one watches 13 minute videos on YouTube. They do when it's you and you're sexy about it. I would watch you for 13 minutes, times six on YouTube. Actually, I'd watch you for 13 minutes, times like 2000. But I'm running in the background for a solid 20 seconds on the treadmill. So I made a good cameo, but it's very much your movie, not ours. Yeah, you just all of a sudden I went downstairs to do the Nordic hamstring curls, the magic exercise we talk about. And you were there absolutely crushing an uphill treadmill. It was beautiful. It was perfect for the video. We're going to get so much engagement from that one little snippet of you running in the sports bra, Megan. Oh, it was so much fun. Which is my first uphill treadmill double in a long time. So it was a symbolic day and we got to catch it on film. Yeah, and you absolutely crushed it. Your training week last week was so good. It's wild how far you've come. Your mileage was great. We did a 16 and a half mile or up an altitude to 8,500 feet. Megan, you're bouncing back and ready to rock. Thanks, it feels good. Actually, my pelvis feels solid postpartum. I had this period of time postpartum where things felt like they were sliding around down there. It was just like not a great situation. Now, I don't know if something switched and I feel great. I feel like things are pretty healed. But the cool thing was, so I've been really struggling on technical terrain postpartum. And on the 16 mile long run, I got to follow your butt around for 16 whole miles. It was even better than looking at your face for 16 miles, that's great. Yeah, well, I look at your overcoming the slip and slide pelvis that a lot of people feel postpartum especially. And I think one of the things that happened on the return that we talked about a little bit last week is you're just kind of constantly panicked about your ankles, right? And that type of concern makes a lot of sense because you haven't done this in a while, but we needed to get over it. And so why do you think it helped to run behind me? Well, you take beautiful trail lines. Just beautiful lines. There's a lot of compliments of me and my body and my beautiful lines right now. Yeah, you know, I'm feeling it, the five AM hour. I'm feeling it. Everything is better at five AM. Actually, we're talking about the ultra speedlegs and I said it was gonna be released in 24 hours for our movie premiere. Why don't we have more media events at five 30 in the morning? I know. Yeah, right. We need to like transition this. We need a whole population of like cultural events that start at five 30 in the morning. Yeah, I always thought I would love to be a stand up comedian, but most stand up comedian spots are like eight, nine, 11 PM. Those are asking us to say eight and nine PM is early. Yeah, it's like I could be a stand up comedian if we had the five AM spot. Oh, for sure. That would definitely be my jam. That would be so fun. But we need a whole, a whole booth of events like this because you know when the doors open at like another 10, I have been asleep for a solid three hours when the doors are opening. So we need, we need a new life set up. Well, I like it. I'm commenting everything about me right now. It makes me feel like Michelangelo is David even because all of my lines are just beautiful. I'm going to stand for eternity through your eyes at five AM. Oh, you have an interesting Michelangelo. I do agree. Most, most of your lines are beautiful. Every once in a while, you will take an atrociously bad line, which is interesting. I don't know where it comes from, but you just have this little like trail sploof moment and you take beautiful straight lines, like efficient tangents. And then every once in a while, you just like do this like little magical fairy airplane and things and it's horribly inefficient. But the line on technical running is really interesting. And I think it's the place we really wanted to start as a training tip for everyone because over the course of this run, you transformed as a technical runner relatively quickly. By the end, we were going down the most technical trails and you were not just right on my heels. You're like passing me at times. Well, I wouldn't call them the most technical trails. We have a lot of listeners out there that kind of classify, I mean, Alex Honald is our listener. Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. I mean, he's free soloing trails. So we are definitely not doing that. I would say they're moderately technical trails. That moderately technical, I mean, there were a bunch of, basically as many rocks as you can get that still allow you to use regular running form, right? Like we're not talking about three foot ledges, but we are talking about pretty technical trails. Or hundred foot ledges. Yeah, exactly. Two hundred foot ledges. In the case of Alex Honald. Yeah, three thousand foot ledges. But one of the main cues we had, and we went to go through some lessons on this right off the bat, is to chop. So what does chop mean to you exactly? I don't even know what it means to me. Besides the word chop. So you told me this, you're out in the trails and you said, Megan, I want you to think about one word. As you're running downhill, think about chopping. So for me, sometimes I tend to overextend my legs as I'm running downhill. And I think because I do that, it places a ton of force through the ground. So like my ground reaction force is really high for each step. And as a result, my risk of rolling an ankle, spreading an ankle is quite high, because there's so much force going through the ground. My foot is out in front of me, that I don't have time to catch it if my ankle sprains. So I thought about putting my feet like more beneath my body and quick fast chop emotion and it helped a ton. That's a very poor description of it, but the word is good. No, I thought that was perfect. Exactly. Feet under the center of gravity, move your feet as quickly as possible. And chop is kind of a misnomer, but I think the most helpful one for someone like you, because it does feel inefficient at first. And the word chop sounds like something that you should be, oh, I don't want to chop. But by saying that, by giving yourself that permission, it really helps. So here's a line from an article I once wrote on this subject. Quote, the hardest thing to internalize about technical running is how the feet can move so fast without missteps. And here's what you need to remember. Technical running is not done one step at a time. It's done five steps at a time. That's a beautiful piece of writing, but I will tell you this, that would actually be a horrible piece of advice for me. Why? If I had to think about five steps at a time as I was trying running, I would not like it. But I think it's the general principles that you think about, like the chop, I feel like allows you to think five steps at a time, because each foot is not undergoing so much ground reaction force. But to my brain, while running downhill, I'd be like, don't tell me that you piece of shit. I don't want to hear about five steps at a time. The bigger point there is not that you're thinking five steps at a time, but the body is moving five steps at a time. Because if you move your feet fast enough, any misstep, you're already on to the next step. And so it's not a concern. Like all of the best technical runners are misstepping all the time. They have no idea where their foot's going to fall when they lift it up. The worst technical runners are thinking about where their foot's going to fall. They pick each foot line very carefully, putting out a lot of power through that foot rather than just going, do, do, do, do, do. And as a result, they get fucked constantly. And over time, they just get overwhelmed by technical running. So I want to take a quick step back and tell a funny embarrassing story. Can I do that? Is this about me or you before I cosign? Oh, this is about you from the ride. Okay, sure. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah, now I think I do. Okay, so we get about 15 and a half miles into this run. We've gone through all the technical parts. We have done just, Megan's absolutely rocked it. Her longest run postpartum. And she's like, oh, David, can you take a little video of me running uphill? Because I want to get this for, so I can look at my form. So I can build my form. And I was like, oh, sure. So I stop at like a relatively non-technical section of uphill. And I'm like, okay, Megan, you can go. And after getting through 15 and a half miles without a single issue, three seconds into this video, absolutely fucks her ankle. Actually, I would just say it moderately fucks ankle. I kind of caught it. It wasn't that bad because I was thinking about my form. But it was fascinating. Because I think I was thinking so much about like power per stride. That I was falling back. I was losing my chop because I was like, oh, power per stride is going to look sexy on camera. And you know what? It fucked my ankle. It did look sexy if you're into like ankle torture porn. Which you apparently were. So after we were running back and I was okay, I spent like 30 seconds being like, ow, ow, ow. And then I kept running. And as we were running back, you said, hey, Megan, I'm so excited to look at the footage of that ankle. And I was like, you twisted bitch. You want to look at me spreading my ankle. That's like such a like sadistic thing. It was awesome. At one point, the ankle joint itself hit the ground. That's pretty sexy, right? Oh man, oh man, I have a visceral reaction. But even thinking about it, and this is why I think I struggle with techno-corrhaning, even thinking about that makes me slightly queasy. Well, it was pretty impressive. So okay, number one is chop. Number two is focus on lifting up the foot with knee drive. This is what Megan talked about. A weird cue that I've always liked for myself is imagine that you're like a marionette and there's strings attached to your knees. So it's just gently pulling up on them really rapidly. Almost like, just like, so imagine their hands going up and down, up and down, up and down. And that's kind of the form that you can embody out there. And that's what all of the best technical runners do when they're on these types of trails. And what I think about, which is interesting to me though, is that there's different types of trails that require different types of form. So I think for me, where I often struggle spreading an ankle is when I'm going from the chop. So I'm going on like really technical downhill trails into something that's less technical. Because I'm like, oh, yay. I can get back and put out a lot of power per stride. And that's when I tend to twist my ankle on literally nothing on the side of the trail. It's one of the worst moments as a trail runner. When you go back and you're like, oh, I'm going to check out that giant boulder that I just sprained my ankle on. And it's like the punious little piece of gravel. Yeah. It's always kind of embarrassing to go back. And I'm like, oh damn, Megan, I'm pretty sure you twisted your ankle on absolutely nothing there. I actually had a kind of intervention last after one of our runs together. I was like, David, you can't tell me that I twisted my ankle on nothing ever again because it gets in my head. Every time I would go back and I would look at it and I'd be like, oh, Megan, that's not even an anthill. It's just your ankle on. I don't know how you did it. It's kind of amazing. It always reminds me of the climbing videos where Alex Hanlader, whoever, is like, look at this hold. And then they go on the wall. And you can't even see the little thing that they're holding. That's what you're like. You're like with those little finger pinch holds, but for your ankles. I just envision those pinch holds as a big as boulder. And it's truly not. But for me, I find that those are often the places that I sprained my ankle. Because I'm going from that chop into a slightly more normal form. But I feel like my ground reaction force just increases a ton in that period of time. So I think like delicately continue the chop and be mindful as you're coming off technical terrain into more runnable and even like flatter ground terrain too. Definitely. And I think that brings us to the final point that applies to all running, which is in general, try to be as late on your feet as possible within reason. That there's a huge amount of difference in the studies between people that are giving cues on how to be late on their feet and what the forces that they generate through their tibia are. And those changes, once you give them those cues, persist for six months to a year. So what's really cool about that is if you're just running on roads or whatever, focusing on being late on your feet can actually reduce some of the force through your legs, which will improve your health, improve how you feel over time. But if you're out there on technical trails, the same exact thing will probably protect your ankles. Because you're having less of that force that can offset, get hit by a rock and have issues. So focus on lightness on your feet. As you're practicing the chop, that might be the most important thing of all. You are a water dancer over the rocks. You are not trying to choose the perfect line. You're just flowing in a relatively straight line down a beautiful trail. I so appreciate water dancer more than marionette. Marionette's remind me of creepy antiques that are going to stare at your soul at four in the morning as I'm laying there awake in bed. But water dancers sound delicate and beautiful. Yeah. I don't know at least actually what a water dancer is. I don't either. But I feel like you can, your imagination can run wild with it. I like it. I like it. I think it's a type of insect. A water dancer? I do. Oh, I like that even more. You like it even more? Yeah, I'm a fan of insects. OK, perfect. Within reason. But actually, I'm going to add on one more tip as well. And this is what I was thinking about this weekend. You made actually a passing comment to me about this one day when I was actually even hiking. And I was taking the most atrocious lines. I was squiggling and curving around rocks. As much as possible within reason is trying to take the straight lines on trails. And I actually feel like for me, as I think about it, sometimes my brain tries to do mental calculus really fast as to like, oh, should I move to the right for this rock or to the left? And I think that's one inefficient. And I think two, it makes me more prone to ankle strains. So it's following you and your straight lines was such a helpful training thing. So I think be mindful of the lines you're taking too. Back when I was a little kid, I really liked monster trucks. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. You're digger and all that stuff. Yeah, every kid goes through a little bit of a phase. And remember about monster trucks is they would just drive over all the other trucks. Oh, I love it. And that's exactly how you have to think about rocks. It's like, if you're trying to choose those fancy lines, one, you're constantly deviating your emotion in such a way that your center of gravity is going to get in the wrong place on your ankle. And you're probably going to take missteps. Two is just slower. I mean, I think there's probably some runs where I run a half mile shorter than you just because I'm constantly taking straight lines through turns and stuff. And through just the trail itself, like you don't need to deviate unless the rock is really big and requires some wild motion. The straighter the line is better. I'm picturing our listeners out there. There's going to be someone lying in the trail cramping. They're going to be like, I'm monster trucking this and sending it right over that person that's cramping. It's going to be great. Yeah. And maybe the hardest part of all this is how it gets in your head a little bit. And you really started to overcome that this weekend. But that's a process. And I'm sure a lot of our listeners out there feel this like ache in your head when you think about technical trails or even write yourself off and think you can't do it. But the point is you can do it. It is so possible. And I think that all gets back to letting yourself have some issues, letting yourself fall. And so that brings us to a conclusion of an article I wrote on technical running. When we were trying to exert control, our brains have a strange way of forgetting the simplest actions. The same goes for writing, public speaking, running, all other sports, sex. Our conscious brain is brilliant at problem solving and also problem creating. Flow state describes when that part of the brain leaves the group chat. Technical running, like rock climbing, can spur that transcendent flow because it forces presence in the moment. That is so freaking cool. But it can also be daunting if you are a mid-run and find yourself thinking about baseball and psychology and beach ball ankles. There is no set answer about how to achieve lightness out there, but I like athletes to try three steps. First, keep re-centering your thoughts on the trail. Your mind will wander. Just bring it back gently if you can. Second, think of it as adventurous play. If you don't actively look forward to technical running, your brain will undercut you eventually. Technical running is when we stop being adults with taxes and performance reviews and start being kids. Embrace the play element, including the falls. Like a kid, you can cry, but if you're not falling sometimes at recess, your recess game needs work. Third, move faster. It's so easy to hit technical trails and think that it'll be easier if you're more careful. Giving yourself too much time to think about a simple task is the worst thing for your brain. So let go and move quickly. You might not always find flow. You might fall sometimes and ankle turns are guaranteed. But along the way, I promise you'll find lots more life. That's incredible, David. That's actually a really great piece of writing. Also, I love that you in here talked about flow state. So for me, I think it all gets back to flow state. And you had this line, flow state describes when that part of the brain leaves the group. I love that. Also, I pictured myself on group runs prior to this as being like that person with an Android text message. So all the chat messages to me are green but that lovely blue color. And because I'm out there, I'm just like the one that's buffing up the group of the ankles. Oh my gosh. Whoever is in the group chat with green text messages, it's like they're just not OK. There's no flow state. There's no flow state. No flow state at all. But I think for us, that 16 mile long run was one of my favorite adventure dates with you. And I think it's because we were on technical single track, almost 15 of those 16 miles. And there was this element of flow state following behind you. And I think if out there, if you have a partner, if you have a training buddy, someone who's great at technical running, follow their line. Take that as a gift. It was such a gift to have that date with you. And I feel much more confident in my flow state now. It's so fun to see your body just responding to all of these interventions. And your brain coming right along with it. You are so fucking inspiring, Megan. And I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Oh, I love how you describe training as interventions. Yeah. I feel like they guess that your heart and soul, you're like, we're intervening on Megan. Let's see what we can do. Yeah. Just like a mad scientist over here. Yeah. I was like, dude, that sounds a little creepy. Awesome. You want to do some cool stories before talking about more running questions? I love this. I always love the introduction of cool stories. Yeah. It's great. It's like an unwritten narrative. Yeah, we have a Google Doc open. And throughout the week, we just write random things that we find interesting in it. And sometimes those things make the podcast. Well, we should have a new segment of like five unwritten stories right alongside our hot takes. I like it. Well, let's get to the first cool story, which is Gwen Jorgensen and the Japanese triathlon race. I don't really know much about this story, but you alerted me to it. And I think it's one of the coolest things ever. Well, I'm a big fan of Gwen Jorgensen. She also just had a baby seven months ago. And Olympic gold medalist. Olympic gold medalist. And over in Japan, there's a World Series triathlon race. And it's very similar to UTMB, where you have to qualify for the race through some sort of mind map of a process to figure out how athletes can actually get into this race and do it. You have to bribe a troll. Exactly. Well, UTMB has stones. I feel like triathlon probably just has platinum coins. There's a sport so goddamn expensive. It's the only way you can get into triathlon races. I can't believe our sport has stones as a primary feature of qualification for things. I'm actually proud of it. It's kind of arbitrary and ridiculous. And I feel like it just coalesces with what trail running's about. Yeah, this is what happens when the kids that play Dungeons and Dragons become popular crowd. It's so true. It's so true. But anyways, Gwen Jorgensen didn't have enough platinum coins or stones or whatever you want to call it, to race over in Japan. But there was a chance they were going to get a letter in off the wait list to be able to do this world series triathlon race. So she flew all the way to Japan with her seventh month old on Mother's Day weekend and was sitting there waiting to see if she was going to race. And she ultimately didn't race. So she went to Japan, probably looked like she had some delicious Japanese food and didn't race. But I was like, this is classic gold medalist behavior to go and invest yourself so much in something of being on the wait list and seeing what's going to happen. And I was really inspired by it. When you started telling me this story, I was just like, oh, of course she raced. Because they're going to let a gold medalist in. She knew that. But in fact, she didn't race. They didn't let her in. One, that is fucking bonkers from the triathlon association. It's like she's a gold medalist. She should be allowed to race whatever. It's kind of like how anyone who wins the master's golf tournament is allowed to come back to the masters, even when they're like 80. Yeah, I know. When we're Jorgensen race when she's 80, she probably beat a lot of people. Can you imagine how scary it would be to race 80-year-old Gwen Jorgensen? It'd be so scary. But more than that, what it really brought to my mind is putting yourself out there and taking risks independent of results that might come from that. So she did this. This is the ultimate risk without any guarantee of even racing. She didn't get to race. And she still celebrated the fact that she made that risk. And I think that's the coolest thing, is to use athletics as a chance to practice risk taking. And it tracks with her entire existence. So Gwen Jorgensen historically has always shot big shots. I mean, she's an Olympic gold medalist. So she deserves to shoot from half court. I feel like she's like Steph Curry. We'll just let her shoot from anywhere. But it's really cool. And I think it tracks her pattern of behavior of showing up and taking big shots. And I don't know. I just thought it was a fun start to hide. And I think it's so cool. OK, next up, we have Martha Stewart becoming a sports illustrated swimsuit, I think, cover model at 81 years old. Very interesting. I freaking love it. Well, you actually put this story on here. This wasn't me. This was you. Yeah. What do you think I was doing when you were out of the house and you were like, OK, no, what I love about this story is just the fact that one society, I think, is moving to being more open to this. Yes, it is a little clickbait, I think, in some ways. But at the same time, as we age, a recontextualization of what is beautiful is so important. Because I think often, whatever society considers beautiful, this gets back to our body image discussion last week is some middle of the bell curve thing about beauty image standards that would be in magazines. And so a magazine doing this is so significant to me. Because yes, 81-year-olds can be incredibly beautiful, too. And the transition away from just it has to fit whatever artificial intelligence would generate as swimsuit model is the coolest thing. And I think so wonderful for the future of society, body image issues. And I think it extends to running, too, because we do the same things in running, where we're like, this is the only person that can be on the cover of Runner's World, or whatever, as an Olympic champion. And it's actually what that definition is. It's so much broader if we open our minds to all the different things that are beautiful about humans. Well, 81-year-old Gwen Jorgensen is definitely going to be on the cover of Runner's World. She's going to be beating a lot of people. She might be winning an Olympic gold medal at 81. So that would be fascinating. I actually struggle with this one a bit more. Well, one, I don't like that we still have a swimsuit issue. That is pretty well. Where are the other humans in swimsuit? It's like, I would love an infant swimsuit issue. Leo has some sexy glutes. He does it. His glutes, he does a lot of training. He does a lot of standing training. He should really be in a swimsuit issue. Why are we featuring only women? Yeah. Well, first. Only female identifying bodies. That's not really fair. First, I do have to comment that Leo's glutes are insane. Oh, they're great. It's hilarious. It's almost like a meme. His glutes are so much stronger than mine. I'm like, wow, the power of your genetics are strong in this one. But two, yes, that's very true, especially when the internet is full of porn. Yeah, exactly. More than half of the internet, I believe, of the storage space in the internet is pornography. And why are we having a swimsuit issue at all? So I don't know. Maybe it's a cool thing, though, that they're using the swimsuit issue now because they're all are these other sources of similar types of material to make OK, let's make cultural statements. I disagree. Well, Martha Stewart, I think, is clearly this 81-year-old picture of beauty. And I think it's slightly unfair that we're highlighting someone. I think we have these. I think ageism is a very real thing. But we have these standards of beauty now that we think about when we age. And I also think that's a little bit unfair, too. Martha Stewart, she looked radiant. She looked amazing. But I would also love to see a Martha Stewart with more wrinkles, with less touch-ups. And I think it's just kind of an unfair reflection of aging as well. And I think sometimes it gives humans this unfair, unrealistic expectations of what age is. And it makes us hide our wrinkles in the deep spots of what actually makes us age. So my conclusion is that you want swimsuit issues for daycare, first. And then the retirement home number two? Exactly. Perfect. OK, that's a good compromise. I like it. Let's just throw some dogs in there as well. Oh, my god. Wouldn't that be fun dogs and swimsuits? A dog pinup calendar? Oh, that would be so great. Oh, shit. OK, next up is the snow on the Western States course. It's bonkers. We're currently like 30-ish days out. And we saw a picture for Robinson Flat, which is relatively far into the race. And there was an out-house type thing that was fully covered in snow. All you saw is the little peak at the top. And they're supposed to be running over those trails in a little over a month. This is going to be spicy. Would you estimate it was like 15 feet of snow? Yeah, probably something like that. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Like 15 Leo's worth of snow. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's going to melt, but it's going to be a wet year. It's going to remind me a lot of 2017. And in 2017, what happened is one, the times were really slow. But two, a lot of unexpected things happened in the context of the race. Because people went out on race plans that were made based on normal years. And what they found is that there's going to be a fuck ton of post-holing, a lot of creeks, a lot of unexpected things in the high country. And that can also be combined with the same 100 degree temperatures you always get down in the canyons. And that can create a really exciting opportunity for some athletes. So that's the year that our athlete, Cat Bradley won, coming out of nowhere. One out of 11,000 people picked her in the Iron Far Prediction Contest. She got in through the lottery that year. Similarly, I think this year, some athlete, basically, any athlete can win if they set themselves up for success like Cat did. If they put in the training, but then also race it smart. So very exciting year. Well, I'm excited. It's going to be about strategy. That's the way that comes to my mind, being smart, being focused, having a plan. But also, part of that strategy is just handling stuff when shit goes wrong. Because I think it's also going to require strategy of thinking on your feet at this race. And I'm excited to see how the race dynamics play out. Are you allowed to bring skis? That would be epic. That would be cool. That would be so cool. Actually, you know what? I don't necessarily have a skiing background. I skied a little bit. So anytime skis get thrown into the equation, it just makes me deeply uncomfortable for my ACL. Like, angles are bad. ACLs are 18 times worse. Yeah. But I think that's the next step in training. Like, you know, UTMB is all about poles. Well, why don't we just start bringing skis out there? At a certain point, let's just start bringing helicopters. Like, let's just totally add things outside of human physiology to the UTMB-required gear list. Well, instead of counting in stones, we can count navel inches. Yeah. Okay. Next up, I tried yesterday, toe socks. So a company sent us, you know, the socks that have little holes for your toe. Megan was like, David, I don't think that's a good idea. You've never done that before. And I'm like, I don't think that much about any of my decisions, Megan. I'm going to wear these toe socks and spoiler alert. It was one of the best runs of my life. Why was it? I don't need to feel like my toe, like the intimate fabric between my toes. It feels like I'm like, that would feel like my toes are suffocating. You forget it after a while. You forget that all you feel is heaven on your feet. Your feet are in the clouds. Angels are singing to them. You're getting caressed by demons. It's both hell and heaven at once. Yeah, I don't know, but I don't need a condom for my middle toe. That's kind of just kind of how I feel about it. I like it to be free. Oh, you like it to be free so it can rub and shave and pause, but no. I'm actually fortunate in that I don't really get blisters very much, but I do want to like dunk on myself a little bit in that I have made fun of toe socks a lot like you are right now. And I was wrong. I think toe socks are pretty nice. Well, I was going to affirm them because they were short toe socks and you've had this habit of wearing different color compression socks, which you haven't washed in about two months. And so when you went out the door in these like same height, same color, same style of toe socks, I got really excited. It's like, David, you look like a fly runner right now. I do because the toe socks were you saying when I choose Ron? Well, I couldn't even see your toes. Okay. Like whatever is going on right now, at least that much. Okay. So if you're out there, maybe try some toe socks, get those sweet condoms on your middle toe to see what happens. Okay. Final little note on this is what we talked about at the start. Ultra legs is out now. It is a series of eight exercises that we've developed over the course of a few years. And Megan has been involved in the development of it, even if she wasn't involved in the video beyond lending her incredible up-to-all treadmill running. I think it's a wonderful routine for every athlete. We've had beginners to pros use it. It is focused a lot on hamstring strength. We've developed via podcast listeners and things like that with people sending in things that work for them and developing it with our pro athletes. So check it out. Ultra legs is out now. I'm so excited. Be careful doing the Nordic hamstring curls. So David, you did a great job showcasing your Nordic hamstring curls. Yeah. How it's kind of a push-up. You put a lot of upper body momentum into the Nordic hamstring curls, which is good because I think you did 45 of them in the filming of the video. Yeah. And I started the cramp. It was rough with the filming of this video. I think the video is kind of interesting too, because throughout I use like VH1 pop-up videos that they used to have in the back in the day, where I would just be roasting myself, making fun of myself via the text. So it might be a fun video to watch, even if you don't want to do the routine. Can you share the call your senators line? I thought that one was especially good. It was okay. So I was doing single leg deadlifts. And when I do single leg deadlifts, I actually use a wall or something for support, which is not how you're supposed to do them. And the reason I do that is because otherwise I'm going to rip a hamstring in half. And I don't really care about my balance. I just want to work on the strength element. And so I looked back at my form, was, and I was like, oh, that is rough sauce. So as I was filming it, I was like, you know, I totally understand this is bad. I'm really sorry to all the strength people out there. If you have a complaint, I don't know, email your senators or something, which I thought was a pretty good burn in the moment. It was a great burn. It was awesome. It distracted from your atrocious form. It was pretty bad. I mean, as great as your lines are at trial running, this form was pretty bad. You see, it's like we talked about the swimsuit issue. You know, we don't want some AI generated, beautiful form. Actually, that's true. Yeah. That's why we talked about the swimsuit issue. Exactly. Who knows for adding that to the podcast that way. Full circle. Yes. What we want is we want the equivalent of someone who has been hit with a two by four across the face, just like fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, but for athletic strength form. Well, that sounds like me after I do technical trail running. I'm going to be on the next swimsuit model cover. Megan, you hit every sexy branch on the way down. Okay. Now we have a transition to one of the coolest studies ever that was just published in BMJ Open. And one of the first authors on it, I think the first author is Megan freaking Rhodes. Aw, thank you. Yeah. I just came out the other week, co-first author on the paper. Yeah. I actually, it's interesting when you write papers. Yeah. I have no, I don't know, I have no ego with writing papers and like, I'll be whatever author you want me to be. What it's called is that healthy runner project. That's kind of what started this. It is something that's lasted since 2013 in action. It takes data all the way from 2010. You've been a part of it from almost the very beginning and eventually became like your main thing through med school and then a big thing that you didn't PhD. So can you give us a little bit of a summary on your involvement with the project, how it came to be and where this paper even came from? Yeah, it's a super cool project. So we did it at Stanford and UCLA. Yeah. So started all the way back in 2013. I was a young medical student at the time. Lots of, actually you look at the names on the paper and it's like the who's who of the sports medicine world. So Mike Fredrickson, a really an ateve, Emily Kraus, Adam 1040, like really great people. Also, some of those people like Adam 1040 was a resident when they started and now he's you know, a really impressive doctor in Boston. So it's kind of wild how 2013 spans the careers of some of these physicians. But so. Yeah, it's like the scientific Avengers. Yeah, exactly. And in this who are you? You're definitely like Iron Man. Like I'm going to give you your Iron Man. I'm not going to say who's Black Widow. I just panicked because I could probably name all of two. Yeah, yeah. And you just named them and I was like, well, I can't have a third. Yeah, you didn't understand the joke, which is okay. It's okay. That's what I get. And that's why I was alone a lot as a teenager. So in this intervention, so what we decided was that we've been seeing a really high rate of bone stress injuries in in college. Some programs we see like up to 50% rates of athletes incurring bone stress injuries. So really high, probably not surprising to listeners out there. I think the constellation of low energy availability and how that feeds into low hormones, menstrual cycle disturbances and then bone stress injuries is just this rough cascade of the female athlete triad male athlete triad and relative energy deficiency in sports. So we said, hey, we don't want this to keep happening at the college level. We really need an intervention that we can study in this study and then think about how can we expand that to the NCAA. So what we wanted to do was design a nutrition, education intervention that was designed around having athletes reach positive energy balances. So not being in a state of low energy availability. And we also wanted to like measure biomarkers, do DEXA scans and help athletes understand where they were in terms of a risk assessment and empower them to think about like, you know, let's improve these biomarkers and let's do it from a lens of performance. I love that design so much because always we talk about these studies that are essentially, hey, you need to eat enough. You need to think about these nutrition issues. You need to understand your biomarkers and all of these different variables. But then we almost never see the next step taken. Like, this is the most ambitious study I've seen in this field in quite a while because you're like, okay, the next step is the hard part. We know this stuff. How do we make it work in the field in practice at high level institutions where performance fricking matters? And I mean, as a result, it was this project that had a huge scope. So there was a historical cohort from 2010 to 2013, which I think just used past data before the project started, right? Yes. That was a retrospective cohort. So we were like, well, this intervention is great, but we don't want to only give it to some athletes and have this be like a randomized control trial where we're having an intervention group and a control group. We want to make this standard of care. But then when you do that, you're like, well, we need something to compare it to. So we decided from 2013 to look back at bone stress injuries to 2010 and create this historical cohort. And then to have a prospective cohort from 2013 all the way to 2020, we did have an implementation cohort in there just to make sure this worked. But seven years of a prospective study and then comparing those bone stress injury rates to the rates in the historical cohort. That's so cool and so wild. But also just sort of an outsider's perspective raises some issues. It points out how hard science is because that historical group is under a totally different context. You're here. Yeah. So if someone in 2010 might be on a totally different team than someone in 2019, and it would be so convenient if you could do control groups within each year, right? Like this group is going to be matched, pair matched, and not have any intervention done on them. And let's see if their rates are different. But it's a sign that you're doing the Lord's work because that would be unethical to not give people the intervention you're trying to formulate here. Well, thank you for highlighting the limitations of the studies. Great. I'm taking your role. Well, this is awesome. I'm going to be glad you had my dissertation defense. And I'd be like, yo, guy in the audience. Explain the limitations of the study. And so when I was at your dissertation defense, I was just like, this is the most brilliant thing I've ever heard. Everyone else to hear it. But it is a challenge though. And one thing that we really struggled with throughout the study is a lot of this depends on the athletes that were recruiting and their baseline risk factors coming in. And we found ways to adjust for that and analysis and to think about that. But teams shift and team culture shifts wildly through time as different athletes come through the program, as coaches come through the programs. We even had some changes in registered dietitians who were administering the intervention. And so that was one big challenge with the study is just controlling for all this natural flux that happens at a college institution. Do you have any takeaways about culture and how that plays a role in the development of these types of injuries and also just how it permeates a group of people? I think culture plays an outsized role. I think almost every college coach should think about the culture that they're establishing on a team. And how do you make that culture healthy and consistent and loving and supportive over time? And that was something actually, so when we first thought about this study in 2013, we didn't think about measuring culture. We didn't think about this being such a huge confounding variable. And we've actually, so once we rolled out the study, we wound up doing a larger study in the Pac-12. And we actually set out specifically two measure culture. Interesting. Because we recognized that this variable was so huge that we really needed a way to measure this and account for it. And that Pac-12 study is ongoing? Yeah. Okay, so for context here, this is a quote from the article. At institution one, the overall bone stress injury rate dropped from .63 to .27 events per person year from the historical to intervention phase, which is significant, whereas no decline was observed to institution two. So in other words, there seems to be some sort of cultural difference here, perhaps. And I think the open question is, okay, now that we have the nutrition education and all of these tools for the athlete, how can we support positive cultures to develop? Because in my experience, a lot of this takes just a little bit of a contagion to become a problem. Exactly. It's not like there's bad intentions from the coaches. It's often just that you let these contagions go unchecked and let them spread in such a way that one issue can become ten issues really rapidly and start to affect the whole team. Well, I think often it doesn't even come from the coaches itself. It's the conversations that happen in the locker room. It's things that- Or unstated things that happen at dinner tables. Yeah, or just one athlete who you might be struggling with low energy availability, performing really well, and younger teammates being like, oh, I want to emulate that. But I appreciate that you highlighted the results of the study. So interestingly, what you stated was actually post-hoc analysis, meaning that wasn't our primary aim of our study. So our primary aim of the study was to look at both institutions combined and to see how bone stress injury rates are changing. All we actually found was that there is just a ton of year to year variability in bone stress injury rates. And there wasn't that clear linear pattern of decline that we really hope to see at the outset of the study. But instead, when we stratified by institution, we actually saw that one institution did have this beautiful linear decline, whereas the other institution had more year to year variability. And our theory was, oh, that's probably related to team culture, because we found it harder to implement the study at one of the institutions. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so like the difficulty of implementation points out some cultural issues. Similarly, though, I imagine it could just be training approach and how that varies with coaching and different approaches year to year, how many track workouts they're doing, things like that. So that's fascinating. And I think you're following it up on it now with some of these interventions you're doing in high schools, where you're trying to really uplift and make it fun to understand how much you need to eat in these things about your body. So my take is that part of the goal here is not to just lecture people about what they need, because at this point, if any of these athletes are paying attention, which they're brilliant people, they are. They know the science here. The problem is that there's people that are like, oh, but are they actually telling the truth about how much you need to eat? Is that what the real best people are doing? A lot like Lauren Fushman's book, Good for a Girl Said. So I think making that stuff culturally fun, rather than something that's like getting lectured at physics class, I want this to be so cool, like something you're watching on Netflix. And I think that that's one thing that you guys are really stepping up with now. Well, this is really fascinating feel that looks at behavioral change studies. And what they find that I think is relevant to the study is the idea that knowledge is helpful in terms of thinking about someone wanting to change behavior. But it's usually not sufficient for that person to actually go and change behavior. And so it gets at the idea that, yes, we can give these athletes knowledge through education, but it really is going to take like, that's the first step. And then it's really going to take coming in with larger steps of having this come from role models, talking about it really openly, actually making the athletes feel like this is linked to performance in creating this deeper sense of wanting to change beyond knowledge. And that was a big takeaway from the study is like, yes, it's education, but it's also coming in and reinforcing that with knowledge, with role models, with some of these other different processes. And that becomes really helpful for actually creating behavior change. Yeah, I love that. And make it fun. Like, you know, as a coach, I'm always like, burger is pizza, wildly fun celebrations of food, not because that's the only way you have to do it. And sometimes I get criticized for that. We get criticized for that. The only thing is like, we see the other side and, you know, these stone cold lectures from people talking about, you know, I've been in eating disorder treatment and you don't want to go there. It's like, you don't scared straight people, like, you know, like scared straight, like it's used for criminals or whatever. Like that type of approach is not how to approach athletes who are trying to maximize their performance. The way to do it is to be like, guys, we got this. This stuff is freaking awesome. This is the science, but also you, we understand the difficulty and we're here for you. So I love that. It's been so cool. I think it also gets the idea of asking athletes the question of what they want and where they are in the journey and meeting them where they are. So in follow up studies too, actually, we look at where they are in the terms of stages of behavioral change. Like, are they actually willing and interested in making this change? And if not, how do we get them there? So I think it's also about like the more research I do, the more I realize it's always about asking the questions. Yeah. Like asking, asking our target population, what do they actually want? Where are they? How can we help them? And like, that's been huge. But one final point actually that I think is interesting for this podcast, just from like a sexy science perspective, is the idea that we actually saw this intervention work differently on different types of bone stress injuries. So we have- So this part's wild. This part's really cool. And this was actually the basis of a second paper that's coming out shortly. So we have cortical bone stress injuries and trabecular bone stress injuries. So cortical bone is that hard, dense outer layer of bone and trabecular bone, also called cancerless bone is kind of the spongy, more metabolically active portion of bone. And what we found is that low energy availability actually preferentially impacts trabecular rich bone. And so what we saw in this intervention was that our intervention to help athletes achieve adequate energy availability was actually significantly reducing trabecular rich bone stress injuries. So that makes sense because that's the more harmonally active bone. And trabecular rich bone includes things like the pelvis, the femoral neck, calcaneus. And so it was interesting to think about how- Is this a sacrum included in that? Yeah. How athletes are fracturing, super fascinating. That's so interesting. And maybe it points out that, look, stress fractures, one, it's never your fault. But two, like you're going to get a certain number of injuries, even if you do everything right, sometimes you're athletes. Like, shin bones, cortical, I assume. Yep, shin bones, cortical. Like really a card bone. Medatarsals, cortical. Yeah. Like, so sometimes if you're an athlete out there that's had shin splints or how to stress fracture in your shin, it's like, yeah, that's probably going to happen as you start running unless you're just like a lucky genetic specimen that has really interesting bones. But these trabecular rich bones, like, they can be altered a little bit over time if you under fuel for even short periods of time. And the fact that this study found that, even with the underlying confounding variables that we've talked about, to me is the coolest part. I didn't actually realize how significant this finding was until you started telling me about your dissertation. I'm like, Megan, I wish I had known this sooner. It's the coolest data ever. It's really gone. It builds on a lot of other studies that have looked at this. But I think it's fascinating. So, like, to me, an athlete comes to me with a trabecular rich bone stress injury, and it always sends out the red flag of, like, let's investigate hormones, let's investigate, you know, eating menstrual cycles, some of these other factors. GI system. GI system, yeah. Like, you know, even if you're eating well, you could have some sort of issue with absorbing nutrients or something like that. Well, it's interesting. I often see GI issues associated with low energy availability. So it's kind of like, you know, what's the chicken or the egg? Because athletes that have low energy availability so often have GI issues that once we solve the energy availability, usually the GI issues decrease. So, I just wanted to thank you for this. Out of curiosity, how big was the data file on this type of study that lasts, like, what, you know, 12, 10 years or whatever? How big was it? Massive. And mine bubbling. Fortunately, it was a sort of thing. Like, I actually did a lot of the data collection, which is pretty unique for epidemiology, where you usually just get handed large sets of data. So it was nice because I really felt like I knew each data point, and I was curious. Yeah. It was like, as I was inputting the data, I was like, ooh, this is fascinating. I'm learning things. So I think for me, because I love the topic of this study, I was deeply invested in the data entry and the collection. And it was just, it was really cool. I love that. So headline takeaway for athletes that are listening to this podcast, how they can apply to themselves and their teams, anything that you have right off the bat. Well, I think, think about team culture. Yeah. Always talk openly with athletes about low energy availability. Sometimes I feel like coaches, it's like they feel like if they're going to address it, it's going to make the problem worse. Yeah. So I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. I think that's a really good thing. 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So definition of collagen here, it's the most abundant and structurally important protein in the human body. Wow. You can get it from a bunch of different sources. It's usually animal based like bones and things like that. But it also can come from genetically modified yeast, which I think theoretically counts as a vegan option, which is interesting because I used like, breathe and stuff, I guess. But still, technically a vegan option. It's not just from cow bones. Well, I feel like eating yeast is a lot different than cow bones. Yes. True. I feel like we start with something that's challenging and we progress to yeast. Yes, great. It's a slippery slipneck. Yeah, right. First it's yeast. Then what comes next? Addy dog. Different direction. The first expecting. But actually high five on those. That's really hard to transition back to talking about collagen after that one. But it does go down with age. Yeah. Actually, which is something that I have. So levels in the human body. Yeah. Levels of collagen go down with age. I find that curious because perhaps supplementation will help aging athletes. But here's where I struggle with collagen. So collagen essentially is a bunch of specific amino acids. It's not a complete protein. So it's different than having protein powder in that you're not getting that full range of amino acids. You're getting a few very specific amino acids. Yes. And those are glycine, proline and hydroxyproline. And so collagen in the human body, which is embodied by these amino acids, goes down with age and that's one place that people have found that could be significant. And so thinking about some of these amino acids, glycine stimulates the secretion of GLP1, which is like a peptide, which could increase fatty acid utilization in the human body, which is really interesting because if you remember when we talked about the microbiome, some of the beneficial adaptations for some of the genus of microbiome also work through GLP1 by increasing free fatty acid utilization. So maybe there's something there that like collagen increases the level of this amino acid in your bloodstream, which could improve not just like your overall body health via collagen, but also your performance via preferential use of fat at higher intensities. Via literally every theorized thing on Google. So if you Google collagen is the wild west in terms of claims about what it can improve, I've sking, it's skin, nails, hair, but then all things from athletic performance, I've seen studies done on whether that's lactate threshold, VO2, max, GI system related things. And I'm going to just cut to the chase right now and say outside of skin, hair and nails, the effects of collagen are very, very mixed. Some studies find success, but a lot of the studies that find success are comparing collagen to a control group of multidextrin, which is sugar, but the studies that compare collagen to a complete protein powder actually don't seem to find that much impact, but let's dive into them. Yeah, but first I want to say skin, hair, nails. I mean, how else am I going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue at 86? Fly as hell. I just need a lot of collagen. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the complicated thing here is that often these intervention groups have like normal level sample sizes. And like if collagen has any preferential impact relative to protein, maybe it's on the scale of like such a small number that you would need a massive sample size controlling for tons of variables. And I don't know forever going to see that in a study. So I do question a lot of the studies we're going to talk about today, just in the context of like, should this determine behavior and how much can we actually learn from them? I think it's a little difficult to know. But what I'm fascinated about on the population level studies are the data points that are outliers. And I think, you know, if we coach a population of, let's say we have a population of 100 athletes that there are going to be outliers within that population. And like, what are the athletes that this might matter for? So I think athletes that have like joint health issues, athletes perhaps that have GI issues, maybe it's worth trying. But I think it's always kind of curious to swirl around in those, in those outliers and be like, well, why, why are they responding to this intervention so well? Yeah, definitely. So let's start with GI actually, because the hot take from the Patreon listener was regular use of collagen peptides is a miracle drug for preventing running quote, code brown emergencies. And the theory there in the scientific literature, would that be there would be attenuated intestinal barrier dysfunction? Not something I necessarily fully understand. But it was not backed up by a 2023 study that just came out in the European Journal of Nutrition. So who knows how relevant this is. Well, the mechanistic theory behind this is that collagen impacts the expression of tight junction proteins, which make the intestinal barrier better and, you know, more, I would say more robust. But I have loose junction protein. I would say tight junction proteins are like the perfect description. I want those tight junction proteins in my GI system. My junctions are very, very, very loose. Your junctions are saggy. Yeah. So the theory there would be you take some collagen before exercise. I did it yesterday before my long run, didn't have to poop with friends, which was good. I never would have to poop in front of friends. But you don't have to poop in front of friends very often. Do you? It's been pretty bad over the last couple of weeks since the race. So it has been a nice transition for me. Oh interesting. I think I had zero vegetables. And as we talked about before, I think vegetables, man, they're just pre-pooped sometimes. Well, maybe we should just try pouring some collagen on broccoli. Kind of like cheese, just melting it in the broccoli and seeing what happens. I like it. Let's do it. Okay. So some other studies, 2020 study in the front years of nutrition. The treatment group did 15 grams per day of collagen. That's generally the amount you see, which is usually what you'll get in a lot of these collagen supplements. They had improved heart rate at lactate threshold and distance covered and in the endurance test. So that's pretty interesting. The quote from the study is, this might potentially be a consequence of improved structural and cardiometabolic adaptations, which seems very general, but we'll go with it. It's very general, but I actually like the study. So the study was a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial, which is legit. That is a study that has really taken every aim to isolate the specific effects of collagen peptides. And so I was curious by this. I was impressed. It didn't have a huge impact. I wasn't thrown out the door and made like, give me all the collagen, but this was a good study. Okay. And then another 2020 study, 15 grams a day, again, that found attenuated performance decline, the day following eccentric exercise. It makes sense. It's a protein. So it'd probably improve your recovery, but it's a different type of protein. So maybe there's something there that's kind of interesting. 2023 study, this was on male athletes. It found no changes in bone formation amongst men, but past studies have found improvements in bone mineral density amongst postmenopausal women in particular, which I think is really relevant here. There's a 2018 study specifically that looked at this and they looked at changes in bone mineral density, so as measured by Daxxis scans, as well as plasma levels of bone markers. And they actually found strong impacts from the collagen peptides, but they, of course, measured it compared to multidextrin. Yeah. So it's like, how do you, how do you actually compare that because would a protein powder, like our protein powders we talked about last week, sent, Viga, a complete protein powder, you might have the same impact. Definitely. Yeah. They looked at 15 different randomized controlled trials and they found that there's moods beneficial in improving joint functionality and reducing joint pain, which is pretty interesting. But exact, they didn't really find this cross population impact that was going to be incredibly relevant. They said the exact mechanisms for the adaptations that they did see for muscle recovery and strength and things like that were uncertain. And what is really needed in the future are studies with larger sample sizes that include lead athletes, more female participants, and more precise outcome measures. So we're still in the wild west, I think, of collagen. I don't know exactly forever going to isolate this because we're going to need such big sample sizes and non-industry funded studies and things like that. But it might be a place to experiment, I think, if someone is a little uncertain. And there's very few downsides of taking collagen. You're getting protein. You're making your skin fly as hell. Yeah. It's great in this process. Think about all the dead yeast, though. Yeah. Exactly right. And there's a lot of collagen. I mean, there's like, there's, we could, actually, we could spend a whole entire episode going in through the different forms, the different types of collagen. It's a little bit beyond the scope of this discussion. I just don't think it's entirely relevant. Problem is, I think the studies basically show you need puppy collagen. Yeah. If the collagen doesn't come from a fluffy dog, does it even work? I mean, even better at an 11 year old super loving, floofy, Addy dog probably has the grade A collagen that would actually make a difference. You know what? I love Addy, but performance megan. Performance, myself, need to be touched by the light of heaven. Well, I think I think about three different populations of people that might, and I'm putting a strong quote on might benefit from collagen. One being, I think athletes that have a history of arthritis or joint related pain. So I have inflammatory arthritis as part of my autoimmune process. I was like, hmm, maybe collagen might work. I haven't really seen any impact. Yeah. Two, I think athletes that might struggle with bone mineral density. Collagen might be great, but I think protein powder also might be great too. Definitely. If you're an athlete and you want to look fly as hell on a swimsuit model cover, this might be for you. Yeah. Okay. I like that. That's basically all I want. I want that like my cheeks already. We were talking last week about how people are saying we're looking a lot older than we are. It's like, that's just a sign maybe that we need collagen. This is like the sequel to that discussion last week. Why are you going to keep taking it? I am. Yeah. It's actually kind of delicious. It's kind of delicious. It mixes really well. It's easy. It's not that expensive. It's just a new type of protein supplement. In granted, it's not a complete protein, so it's not going to replace other types perhaps. But as a pure additive factor, I don't think it can hurt, right? Especially if it might help my stomach because if my stomach is not so great, that's going to hurt my absorption like we talked about earlier as it relates to bone injury. So is it just a protein supplement perhaps? But you know what? We're fucking fans of protein. Yeah. Protein is great. That being said, I have seen some reports of people reporting nausea, bloating, some of these other, so I think monitor how you feel if you do decide to take it. The other thing is read the label. So the other day you were putting collagen in a drink and you put one nice little scoop and I was like, David, it says two scoops is the serving size. So maybe you'll feel more than fine if you actually take the serving size. Okay, so what you do is you take the collagen, first you start with water, then you put in Nesquik and you put in some creamer. Then you put in a little bit of salt and then you put in collagen and you have a collagen shake that brings you back to your childhood, both in terms of your brain as you get the taste and in terms of your body as all of my wrinkles fade away and my muscles feel all good and my stomach is great. Oh, I'm so excited to bang eight year old David. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Right. You'll have the swimsuit issue. You're doing that. Okay. That is a fun conversation. Do you want to get to short distance racing or sex function and athletics? Let's go to sex function and athletics. Then let's go to hot takes and then we'll go to a professional conversation and then listen to a corner. Oh my God. A road map. Yeah. All of our listeners are after we did the Megan lead author study. They're just like, Oh shit. I'm seeing the boss come out. Okay. Here's a question from Patreon. As always, patreon.com slash swap. That's the way of you. Hello. Here's a great sexy science question. When I increase my training volume above 40 miles per week, my sex drive decreases, my ability to maintain erections diminishes and morning wood is straight up non-existent. I'm a long time listener of your podcast and I've really embraced the idea of eating enough always. I've suspected that this could be Red S related, but I haven't noticed any improvement after stuffing my face with extra food on those big weeks. I've had my blood work done and sex hormones are within normal ranges. There have been times where I've taken a week or two off for running and things down there return to normal, which confirms that running appears to be the cause. It seems like this shouldn't be typical for a mid 30s male. Is this common or are other guys just not talking about it? Am I broken? Do I need to quit what I love doing most running? Any ideas on what I can try would be greatly appreciated. Well, I'm so grateful for this listener for emailing this question because it takes courage to talk about this stuff. We make jokes on here all the time, but it's not easy to talk about this stuff. It's also not easy always to make this a priority in your life, but no matter where you stand sexually, listening to sex drive as a biomarker as part of the body is important. It goes beyond just the act of having sex. It's about thinking about the hormones and what the body is doing underneath the surface. Yeah, if you're an asexual athlete listening to this, this is still very important as a marker for your overall health and things that you might want to do for your body. Just for everyone else, if you're experiencing anything like this, male athletes with erections, female athletes with sex drive, non-binary athletes with your sexual function, you are not alone. The parenthetical of this listener had, or other guys just not talking about it, is so true. People just don't talk about this type of stuff. It's one of our goals when we started the podcast. Unless they email us. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we get a lot of people talking about it. I don't know why. I think we're pretty open. I think we're pretty open. I think basically when we started the podcast, the very first time we said, woohoo, we started taking questions about erections. It just comes with the territory. But so many people are right there with you. No one is talking about it, but this is incredibly common, not just for athletes, but everybody. It is an anxiety that I have even in my journey, where I'm like, oh, is this going to affect me and all that? So, no, you're not alone. And the things we're going to talk about today should apply both to male athletes, anti-mothletes, non-binary athletes, everyone under the sun. Well, I think the first suggestion I'm going to get to, which builds up our last discussion, is protein. Yes. And when I talk to athletes that are experiencing something like this, and I'm like, hey, let's do a deep dive on the amount of protein that you're getting. And visiting an RD is great for this, but we can also just do like really rough estimations. And usually the rough estimations indicate that an athlete is so far off their daily protein needs. So I think the first place I start with is protein. So protein is associated with sex hormone binding globulin, which for athletes is often associated with measures of free testosterone. So in the body, there's total testosterone. And then sex hormone globulin impacts how much free testosterone the body has. And that's the amount of testosterone the body's actually seeing in terms of functionality. And that's associated with protein. So let's get that protein going, driving, whether it's collagen or protein powder or just delicious tasting protein things. Let's get it rolling. All your puppies out there. Right. Just go on to the boy shipper straight into the gully. And I mean, this is relevant for me because when I got my blood work taken, my testosterone levels were good, but my sex hormone binding globulin levels were very high, which is indicative in a lot of the studies of relatively low protein for that athlete. It varies. There's other causes of it stress can be one. Training intensity can be one. Training intensity can be one. But that's probably what this athlete is seeing. My guess is that their SHBG levels would be high if we measured them. So one gram per pound of body weight for this athlete. Like if you're worried about it, get up that high and see what happens. I think that that can make a huge difference for you relatively quickly. Get that free testosterone up, which is probably what you're seeing. What you're probably seeing here is that your testosterone is fine, but maybe your free testosterone is a little lower than it has to be for you. Another thing that I think about too, and this is a little bit more speculative. I think protein I can say with clear certainty is vitamin D. Yes. So we've seen oftentimes a lot of athletes with low testosterone levels, low, like the biomarkers just not being optimized in general often relates to vitamin D. And it's hard to say what's causal, what's correlative, what is actually causing what. But I think it doesn't hurt to get those vitamin D levels up. So I would recommend get a test in general to look at all your biomarkers, but I'd be curious to know vitamin D levels. I've almost never seen excessively high vitamin D. I think people think they get enough from sun, but you probably don't. Oh, yeah, unless you're out there baking all the long, even then, yeah, your skin probably adapts. The messaging on the number of times I get messages about blood work. And they're like, but I'm in the sun a lot. It's like, who told you this? It's not the way it works. Like, yes, you produce some, but you degrade it through other mechanisms. And you need a fucking lot of it. So 5000 IU a day, if you're low is a good place. Make sure you do get tested. We don't want to disclaimers and all. But that can be really, really helpful. And again, this applies to both female athletes and male athletes. It's really important. Next one thing that like if you listen to Huberman podcast or talk to like inside tracker or anything like that, they'll often recommend the herbal supplement Ashwagandha. Because with Ashwagandha, they don't understand the mechanism of this, but it reduces cortisol, stress hormone, and cortisol can suppress testosterone production and sex hormone function in general for female and male athletes. So a place to consider this is a reason that we love athletic greens. And it might be one of the causes of athletic greens working for some people is that it has Ashwagandha in it through a bioavailable source. So this could be a place that that's really helpful. Well, I think we might be the first podcast to talk about athletic greens in relation to erection. But here we go. We are doing it. I mean, initially we talked about it because that's when we got pregnant. We got pregnant because of the Ashwagandha in athletic greens. Oh, it's true. It's coming back full circle. Yeah, exactly. So athletic greens.com slash swap SWAP. SWAP. If you use that link, you get bonus travel packs. You get a vitamin D dropper. Wow. That's even perfect because you have the liquid vitamin D right there to get your vitamin D level. And it's so easy. It's literally a dropper. Just don't take the whole thing. I did that once. Almost actually I almost did that one. And it's a way to support the podcast. Do athletic greens.com slash swap SWAP. You don't need to use that source though. That is the one that is safe for sport. We had there are zero other Ashwagandha supplements right now that are safe for sport if you go to their website. The final thing that this athlete might want to look at are circulatory variables. This could be a relation not to testosterone and hormone levels but more related to things like blood pressure. And if that's the case, it's a complicated medical question. But some people talk about success with things that vasodilate. So examples would be a beat supplement that increases nitric oxide in your blood vessels or L-arginine or L-cytraleen, two different types of amino acids that can dilate blood vessels. They work on similar mechanisms as things like Viagra. But at a much lower level, don't mix those types of things because your blood pressure can drop to dangerous levels. This is a place where be careful, talk to a doctor, but you might want to consider this. And there's also tons of other variables that go and that feed into sex drive. And I think untangling your medical history is really helpful. So antidepressants actually can blunt sex drive. Animals, females, non-binary individuals, really fascinating the impact of antidepressants. Depends on obviously antidepressants important for mental health. So have a conversation with your doctor. Interesting studies on oral contraceptives for female athletes in sex drive. Largely they're showing that it doesn't impact sex drive. But there's of course there are some people on the outliers where it really, really does. And so I think just dig into your medical history, think more about some of these factors too. And just no matter what, you're great the way you are. The things that people think are normal sexually are not necessarily normal. Whatever your baseline is, is normal. Compare to your baseline, understand your body and what brings you the most fulfillment in life. Try to optimize your health first and those hormones that endocrine system stuff really matters. Make sure your training is mostly easy. Do some high intensity but keep that high intensity really focused. That's one of the reasons we talk about this with training. Then start to think about things like nutrition, sleep, all the other factors that go in. And just know that wherever you find running might affect you, you can reverse it. There are ways to get around that. We'll figure it out. Try different interventions and never think that running is going to cause you to have to rethink your sexual existence. That's not the way it works. We might need to rethink running a little bit and how we do it. But you're never going to need to go cold turkey stopping running. It's just a question of balancing those health variables. Well, I'm so glad you brought up briefly the idea of low energy availability because I think that was just assumed as we talk. We talk about it so much on this podcast that think about feeling as one of the first interventions. Pizza, throw some pizza on it, throw some burgers on it, throw some Addy Dog collagen on it and see what happens because I think feeling might be at the heart of all of this. What would the swap porn be? Throw some pizza on it would be the title of our pornography video. Oh yeah, not throw some D's on it. Throw some Z's on it. Oh my God, it brings up a whole thing. You know how porn they have the thing where a guy comes in and says, so you ordered a pizza and she's like, I didn't order a pizza. And it's like, yeah, you did. Everybody ordered a pizza that listens to the spot. Every single person out there is a participant in this all the time. That's incredible. Okay, let's get on to hot takes. As always, these are things from listeners on Patreon for the most part. We're just going to read them off, react to them. These are not necessarily things we believe or our listeners believe. These are just the spicy takes that come in our heads sometimes. And they feel really good discussion. I'm going to jump all the way down the list because my brain just goes to one short sentence and I can't unsee it. It's leftover and cold pizza is better than hot pizza. Okay, that person is so wrong. Well, I totally cosign and this is a challenge of a relationship because almost every morning when we have pizza leftover in the fridge, I get up and I'm so excited. I go downstairs to eat my cold pizza and you are horrified. I put it in the microwave for you. Well, you asked me 25 times. I'm eating there, enjoying my delicious cold pizza and you're like, Megan, I must microwave that. I must microwave that. I'm like, no, David, it's actually delicious. No, it's not okay. There's actually studies on this that find that a human brain activates the hot cheese significantly more than cold. I wish I had brought out the study to really dunk on you right now. But anyone who says they like leftover cold slash cold pizza is just saying they like being a lazy bitch. Well, come over and be my friend at 6 a.m. because it's my 6 a.m. pizza of choice. Great. You actually have pizza in the fridge. You're probably going to eat it when we're done this podcast. Oh, that's so delicious. Oh, that's 6.15 a.m. pizza. Okay, number one. Go back. The best way to prevent blisters before a long ultra is to run sockless in your ratios one to two months out from your race. This causes blisters which turn into calluses and also shows where your hot spots would be. Do this a few times and no way you would get a blister with some nice socks on race day. This is hilarious. I love this. I love this. It's a bad idea. It's great. You know what? I think you should just run a toe socks. Yeah, they should run with your middle toe and a condom. Yeah. Everything else feels free. It's great. But you know, this gets back to me being a crazy bitch when I was younger. So I remember racing the way to cool 50k in 2016, which was a pouring down rain here in Nike Lina Racers with zero socks on. How did you do that? I used to feel like much like you said about condoms. It's like I like all match around. I used to do every single race without socks. You didn't even put lube on though. No. If you're all natural, it really helps to lube it up. And like this person said, I was pretty cut up in my feet afterwards, but it wasn't too bad. Now if I did that, I would be like absolutely having to go to the hospital. I would be out of commission for two months. You have to go to the hospital for that? Yeah, I would. Yeah. And meanwhile, after way too cool in 2016, I raced the next weekend and won $1,000 at a race. I'm like, how did my body do this? For all of our listeners, don't try this at home. Wear nice socks. And also one thing I think that people don't realize is that foot blistering, if we had genetic measurements for it, like if 23 and D did something, you would probably see a lot of genetic variability. So if you're the type of person that gets blisters or doesn't get blisters, you're probably either lucky or unlucky rather than something you do specifically. Well, I feel like it's very similar to cramping. You either cramp or you don't or you get blisters or you don't. And I don't have either affliction. That's great. But it's pretty wild thinking about you in 2016 to be young and to have collagen. Yeah. What a life. I should have did. I'm just I'm going to take the entire thing of collagen in my feet or going to be fucking delightful in my toe socks. I'm just leveling up over here. Okay. Number two, this is really spicy. A lot of people run ultras because they are way more achievable than most people suspect. But you get treated by other people like you're superhuman for doing them and superhuman in all caps. Yeah. I respect that spike. I mean, I mean, people like a superhuman except for doctors when you go in and they're like, you're going to ruin your knees for the rest of your life. You're not superhuman. You're a superhuman with shit knees. Yeah. You're super bitch. Yeah. You know, this is actually a really interesting point. And I think it gets back to the idea that you don't have to run ultras first. Like I was actually on troll on her nation. You can people Google that and it was a whole thing about you don't have to run ultras. And it was the theory of that. But two points out, don't do the shit for ego. Whatever it is you do athletically. Like that's just a slippery slope and it's not going to pay off. I mean, having done now 66-mile or I'm like, yeah, that was less impressive. Like my performance there, then a lot of races I've done that have been 20 minutes long. You know, after a certain point, I just kept going. And you know, I'm happy that I did it and I'm going to do a lot more. But part of the reason I'm going to do a lot more is that for me, it was actually, it felt emotionally easier in some ways than the short distance mountain championships that I've done in the past. But I think because of that context and journey, don't celebrate it less. Yeah. And I was like, this is so cool. You made me so inspired. So I think yes, relentless word progress matters and ultras. But yes, you are still superhuman and believe that. And you're also superhuman if you're on a 5k and that's cool too. Just like the previous listener, you're superhuman, you're a badass beast. If you get erections or don't get erections. Like I know that that's such a weird thing to say in a serious manner. But I think so much of our issues come from us judging ourselves and imagining what our normal needs to be. And to achieve things is the only time you're all to celebrate. It's like, no, celebrate all the time. It takes a lot of pressure off and also cures a lot of problems. All right, next one up. It's not hard to run, easy runs, easy. So much Instagram slash online chatter about people working so hard to actually do easy runs, easy. This drives me nuts. Just be a little lazy sometimes and you'll be golden in zone one. I love this. Yeah. But it was actually objectively hard for me to do this. But once the inertia hit, every time you start out or run running fast, I'm like, you little bitch. We're running way too fast. This is not zone one. Yeah, I think the thing that is really difficult for people is once you start finding your effort creeping up. Yeah, it's the inertia for me. It's really challenging. Yeah, exactly. And so that's what we're trying to give you confidence to do. If you find it creeping up, just dial that shit back. Like turn the playlist into some just chill vibes. Chill hits playlist on Spotify after doing like the pop punk mixed. That'll really slow you down. Yes, my problem. I'm usually good with them the first mile and then mission creep sets in. I'm like, I feel good. I want to run fast. I got Beyonce in my ears. It's hard. I love it. Okay, next one. The 80 to 10 rule, if you're running for over 80 minutes or 10 miles, you have to put band-aids on your nipples. No exceptions. This is great. I've never had to put band-aids on my nipples. So I'm going to defer this one to you, David. Oh, I'm a huge band-aid on nipple guy. Are you really? Oh, I mean, you saw me before, um, Candin's 100k, right? Yeah, that's true. I had two layers of band-aids on my nails. In case one layer came off, I needed another one. Well, the first layer wasn't going to chafe the second layer. I don't know. I don't think about it that much, but really seriously, recommend that to anyone that's ever had chafing in that area. Do not fuck with it. Put all on those band-aids. They're really convenient, really easy. It's essentially like nose strips for your nipples. Oh, you got to open it up and aerate it. You got more poop milk if I put some nose strips on my nipples. Oh, but you can put them just above. You can put the nose strip right above your nipple. Oh my God, it's like having KT tape at my nipples. Oh my God. I'm going to get that milk so hard. We should really develop like a startup. Yeah. You're going to open up all those ducks. It's going to be incredible. You want to do just one more? Yeah, let's do it. I need anyone that you really like. Okay, we're going to finish with the last one because it's kind of relevant to our technical running discussion. There should be a strictly downhill mountain running series on techie single track. Let's be honest, it's the best part of trail running. Well, we got it in downhill bike racing. Yeah. You know, there's people with huge helmets and like all the body pads. I would totally sign up if I could have all of those for downhill running. I look like a four year old going out for a roller blade for the first time. That's how I would do it. That's how I can tell you're getting really confident in your chop. Oh, yeah, the chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Yeah, this sounds like a horrible idea. And you see this sounds great. It doesn't. This is how trailing is going to get on TV. It's going to get on TV. I mean, people do a biking at 45 miles an hour. Why can't we do it running at eight miles an hour? People watch NASCAR and downhill mountain biking for the vicious crashes. I'm pretty sure that that's not what we want running to become. They're going to be padded. They're going to be padded. Yeah. Is the trail going to be padded? Yeah. Are the 3000 foot ledges going to be padded? The little like ant hills where I spread my ankles, those are going to be fully padded. Sometimes it actually say that they want to have the pikes peak descent rather than the pikes peak ascent that's 13 miles and 7,800 feet downhill. Oh, it'd be so fun. Yeah. All of these sounds like terrible ideas. Well, you can see I'm like swirling in this technical running ability. I'm like, I'm going to do the pikes peak descent. It's so perfect. Okay. Now we're going to do something that's a little bit different. This is a professional athlete discussion. So on Patreon on a bonus podcast, we had a little free flowing thing that was different than usual. And we got this feedback from a listener. Wow. I just want to express my gratitude for your conversation about professional training in the bonus episode. I'm definitely not a professional nor do I have those aspirations, but I'm proximal to those that are in my area. It can be bizarre to see how folks clamor over those that are viewed as elite. I've definitely felt a sense of being othered in the past for not being one of the elite area runners. I've also experienced times where people suddenly became interested in me because OMG, I saw you were running with ex professional runner. It can take you back to those junior high school feelings of being with the quote, cool kids. However, nobody who has made me feel othered actually knows me as a person. Also, that professional status can be gone in a flash. There's always a new crop of young athletes ready to make their move on to the scene. Don't get me wrong. It's so fun to watch elites achieve their potential and push the boundaries on what the human body can do. But you are so right and that it will eat you alive to focus on pursuing race wins and pro contracts as the primary goal in running because it isn't going to be what gives you the true sense of belonging and love. You know what people I love? Those that align with my values and interests. Psychology, feminism, equity and sport, the workplace, and in our communities, etc. Those who I can have a deep personal conversation with on a long run or a long walk. Those that show up for each other when a beloved pet dies or when someone needs a meal after having a baby. Some of those people in my life are professional athletes. Some could be and don't choose to play the game and others are far from it. Life is so much richer when I'm celebrating folks for their core values, regardless of whether some tiny fraction of the population elevates them as trail running celebrities. It takes practice, but I definitely appreciate all the reminders that chasing fleeting forms of celebrity or chasing proximity to it isn't going to bring long term fulfillment. Damn, that's a power statement. Isn't that powerful? That's so powerful. Yeah. Okay, so now we're going to insert our discussion on Patreon on this as always very free flowing, a little bit less thought out, but I think this one can be pretty powerful for some listeners. We had so much fun and we're releasing this with a slight amount of heart. We have these conversations like it's a very, very low key dinner table conversation, so enjoy this one. Okay, next question. This is a big one actually. Hi, David, Megan and Leo. I'm a longtime listener and first time writer. I just wanted to say a quick congratulations to Megan for her dissertation defense and David for actually crushing his 100k. You did. Yes, it was, I did. My legs definitely feel it now. Both of her extremely inspiring to watch and the vulnerability and honesty that you shared in the lead in these last couple weeks was beyond special for the community to be a part of. I just had a few quick questions. I've been troneing for a few years now. And I'm incredibly passionate about the sport. Although I have a long history of competition from childhood through the collegiate level, I've recently found that racing too much on the trails begins to impede my gratitude for running and puts me in a position to compare myself to others in an unhealthy and anxiety inducing way. I've also felt both internal and external pressure to do specific races that will directly lead to more exposure and a better chance at running professionally. I've always been intrinsically motivated when it comes to competition and think that as I've gotten older and moved away from collegiate athletics, I no longer feel the need to define my success through racing or to continue putting pressure on what quote professional might look like. Thankfully, I have an awesome therapist and a great support network around me and I've been able to work through a lot of the anxiety and where it stems from. Now I'm still training just as much, but just for a couple of FKT attempts and one or two races a year, the rest is just for me and my love of running. The pressure I once felt is gone and although I recognize it was a very personal experience to begin with, it has allowed me to become a healthier athlete, physically and mentally and not pursuing the goals I'm passionate about. I'm curious if either of you have felt similar pressure when it comes to racing or competition and if you have seen a shift in focus, positive or negative in the true running world as it has become more professionalized. Can you still be a professional in this sport without a full racing calendar or has the definition changed? I was also wondering what advice you might have for someone that doesn't race as much and may not have as many build and rest cycles as another athlete. Is it important to segment up the year with a few bigger efforts or can you still expect to grow as an athlete with 6 to 12 months of just training? Thank you so much for everything you guys do. The impact you make in and out of the running community is absolutely incredible. Sending all the love and good vibes your way. This is so good. As you're going through the questions, I feel like each one of those, I feel like what you just read actually could be the topic of an entire podcast. Oh, absolutely. In a series of podcasts. In fact, that's basically the topic of our book. Actually, this is a topic of what we just talked about with Grace and Murphy. A lot of it. I feel like Grace and has worked through a lot of this. She talked about even about exposure therapy and racing and trying things like mountain biking and Nordic skiing to get what it feels like on the starting line and with a different sense of joy. Yeah. Basically, I think this is a constant battle for all athletes. The weird part about racing is that, yes, we can say it's a personal journey, but by the definition of it, you're being measured against others. It's a really kind of a mindfuck to find that balance between I'm doing this for me and for community without saying I'm doing this to beat people individually, which if you're doing it to beat people or have any sort of external validation, whether that's results, professionalization, all of that, it is a caustic thing that will eat your soul from the inside out even if you have success. That's the big thing that I think someone like Grace and finds. Every athlete really has to find. The thing we're trying to do in the running community is make it so athletes don't have to have their soul eaten to figure this out in the first place. I feel like oftentimes I see athletes, I feel like a manifestation of an athlete having their soul eaten is that they push back against competition or it's almost like they don't want to embrace running. I think for me early on, when I was struggling with some of the stuff and I was feeling like my soul was being eaten, I didn't want to associate too much with running. I was like, I don't want my profession to be running. I don't want to go into sports medicine. I need this whole separate silo of running because I care about it so much and I care about racing so much that if I invest my life in it, what's going to happen to me? I think I see that so often with athletes, it's almost like a defense mechanism and it was for me of being like, well, I'm not just not going to care about this. How did you get over that or how did you transition? You're talking about sports medicine. Now you're essentially choosing coaching as a profession, which is the ultimate direct association. Yeah, it's wild. I feel like I've made a full 180 on that. I think just time and exposure and just getting older and just being like, well, fuck it. I care about this and that's a good thing and I need to work through those emotions because if I care about it so much, I need to lean into that and actually use that as a proxy for making my decisions. I love that. I think the words you said there that are really powerful is fuck it. What is the fuck it moment? I think this athlete has probably already had their fuck it moment because there's probably unstated things that they went through as they reckoned with this and they're ready to recontextualize. If you are out there and you haven't, if you're still on that, it's almost like a hedonistic treadmill, they call it, where you get something you want more, you get something you want more and that's very common in running, especially with external results or anything that's externally driven. If you're still on that, it is time to get the fuck off because it is going to lead dark places, not just for your running but also for your relationships and everything else and it's going to undercut your results. Well, it's going to go to like 12 miles an hour and just start shaking because it's like, that's the type of treadmill that just progressively speeds up and then you're like falling off the back, flinging into the wall so you got some great. So the fuck it moment, like, you often require some sort of low point and so what I would say to someone out there going through this is look for that low point and embrace it. Yeah. Well, I think identify it. Because it sucks in the moment and I think a lot of people have fuck it moments but the only realize that retrospectively but I think the goal is staring at that in the moment and being like, yes, time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and think about it from my context, like, you know, at that 100K, yes, a lot of people were rooting for me. Thank you all, Paige, John. You're the ones that got me through. But, you know, probably a scary number of people were rooting against me. Oh, yeah. And then, realistically, knowing how some people feel about what the shit we talk about, you know, this like love yourself, love others concept and like that thought in the old days would have led to a DNF for sure. But because that's not why I was out there, it made such a big difference. So for this athlete or anyone else aggressively recontextualized training, if you already had the fucking moment, that's great. If not, try to find that the failure is the goal. So like when I did the 100K as Megan told me, it's like, yes, you do, I wanted to drop down the 50K one point. It's like, you're doing the 100K because that's where you're going to learn. So the goal is to have the, you know, granted, I was able to finish, but it was still, there were failure moments out there that I'm learning from. The goal is not to succeed. The goal is to fail. And once you're able to find that little, you know, thread that line where you're just as okay with any type of outcome as long as it is, you know, preceded by vulnerability, the world becomes your oyster because you just have nothing to fear. And that's the cool part about running is there is never anything to fear. It's just our brains sometimes conceive of, you know, big bogeymen under the bed that just aren't there in reality. And I think oftentimes that's like easier said than done, but I think if you line up at races and like make this your ABC and D goal in the day and try races that are like new and different. So you're in this like almost like you're in an entirely different context where you're not bringing those like past associations in. I think that helps a lot. I think I wanted to address the other interesting part of this question too, where this athlete was talking about like wanting a professional contract down the road. And I think sometimes that mixes in and provides this like higher struggle that athletes deal with because they're like, it's this like external based pressure, but I would say like professionalization of running is often a misnomer, like contracts are small, most in actually like a lot of female athletes don't have, I mean, there's a shocking pay gap in show running at the moment and a lot of running too. And I think like there's actually not that much money in sport. So I think if there's a way that you can like remove the professionalization component of it and like establish this like fun of racing first and then think about that, that would be my advice. Yeah, it's really tough because it is a total offset in congruence between the amount that this shit is talked about. If you're at all, if you're paying attention versus the actual like compensation that athletes get emotional or monetary, right? Like you look at Instagram and yours, like it just feels like the sport is totally different than it actually is. In reality, I would guess that maybe 10,000 people, maybe 15 or 20 in the whole world care about the professional end of the sport. I would say, yeah, maybe it's a larger. But I see there's a huge number that care about the overall community of the sport of which professional is a small part. Yep. But like our podcast being a great example, the reason our podcast, I think is one of the biggest ones in running is not because it's because we specifically like hopefully bring everyone under the tent, even as we talk about running in a very hyper specific, like we want to bring out everyone's potential type of way. And that is through the professional end of the sport, but it's more as a metaphor in like an example, then howling it up is like a show on ESPN. And like that's where I think the offset really lies is that sometimes running is treated like or trone in particular is treated like the NBA, you know, like the NBA playoffs and people talk about the athletes is if they're NBA players on podcasts and things. When in reality, the viewership, the listenership, all of those numbers are one one thousandth, one ten thousandth and so people are subjecting themselves to the same pressure that LeBron James feels, even though we are not LeBron James, it is a fully different internal journey. And even if you have your ultimate success, like this is not going to be something that financially stabilizes you for a very long period of time, unless you're Jim Wamsier Courtney DeWelter. And if those are the cases, that would already have been decided, you know, for you in your in your trajectory. So basically what we try to tell athletes, we coach a lot of athletes in this type of boat who are going to become professional athletes who are going to get that external validation is like, try not to get the fuck. Yes. Yeah. If that's possible, because if you do, it's also going to costically eat you from the inside and probably for no good reason. And I feel like then becomes harder to get professional contract. It's almost like I've seen more athletes go on like once they've hit the fuck at moment in life. It's almost like that's when they race their best. And that's when they in fact get the professional contract. So it's kind of interesting like how that all works and feeds together. But you want to go to this next question because I really love this one. Yes. So we're amazing questions in there. Maybe we can bring it out to the main podcast or finishing. I was going to say we should really talk about this in the main podcast. There's like a lot of points that we can tell that we feel pretty passionately because like, yeah, we see behind the scenes and then we also see the Instagram posts and the Instagram posts. There's an offset. Yeah. Oh my God, Megan, it's just, you know, you went for something today that was pretty wild and it's like, you know, I see it and I'm just like, come on. Like, yeah, I don't know. Sorry. Yeah. I'm just like venting. But it may also like people shouldn't feel pressure to like display their whole lives on social media. But it is often there is an offset and I think that's just like a natural part of being a human and existing. But I think like as a human also don't assume that Instagram is the full picture. Yeah. Well, especially because someone is image based, like if you see someone that is a professional athlete on Instagram, chances are that they're getting zero money and a few pairs of shoes and that's it. Yeah. And they're giving so much more monetarily to the company and they're getting back in return by like factors of a hundred. And it creates, I think, an offset between what people expect from the sport and how they structure their careers and goals and what they should do if they actually knew. So maybe at some point what would help is if we did like a full breakdown of everything we've seen and the actual numbers, professionalization of the sport and give young athletes a resource. I love that idea because I feel like athletes can't talk about contracts usually. Yeah. But we've had contracts and now we're out of them and so we can. And not just our contracts, but like we see. We have anonymously, we can talk about any contractor we want as a lawyer. We are not down by any sort of confidentiality and someone else's contract. Yeah. That is true. I also, I would love to expose that there's a huge gender gap and I think that's an interesting thing to talk about. And not because the companies are trying. These are not, this is not MBA money, right? Like we're not talking huge. So like it's not, the pie isn't huge and that's why just in general like from a company perspective, growing the pie in building that is the most important thing. So long story short, you're on the right track. You've had your fucking moment and race more. Exactly. And the athlete should just go on there, race fails so much, fail publicly and see what builds back from that. And build up with weird races at first. If that's easier for you. Yeah. And yeah, just the thing. Yeah, races are great workouts too. And we're back. Woo hoo. That was fun. Was it fun? I don't know. We actually never listened to it. We're just cropping it in now because some listeners really resonated with it. We'll see how it goes. Well, it's like having a dinner table conversation four weeks ago and being like, yeah, that was kind of good, but just remembering the periphery details. Yeah, yeah, having been like three wines deep or something essentially the vibes we bring to Patreon. I think we count that as our listener corner this week. What do you think? I like that. Let's do it. Actually, no, this listener corner is great. Okay. You think we should read it? Yeah, it's going to take 30 seconds. Awesome. It's so good. Stay for this, please. Okay. So this is commentary on the interview with Grayson Murphy that came out the other week. Other than the name, because you have mentioned her before, I knew nothing about Grayson, but this is one of my favorite interviews ever, not just favorite swap interviews. Amazing woman. I hesitate to pick out one thing I liked, but I loved how she described herself as thin skinned. I think there's a huge pressure on pro athletes to say that they don't pay attention to criticism, or they just let it bounce off. I suspect that for some of them, it's true, but for many, they are just afraid to admit that they are like most humans and get hurt by mean things, like it will hurt their image or give their opponents something to use against them. I respect her so much for just throwing it out there. It took great courage and honesty, but I also think of the ripple effect on people who look up to her. I immediately sent a link to the interview to a 15-year-old girl I know. Grayson would be such a great person to model after. Oh, that makes me so happy. That interview with Grayson, after finishing that, I was just inspired to do things in life. Yeah, it was great. And to do things without, I think every human is thin skinned by existence of being a human, unless they have some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, which sucks in its own right. Yeah. I don't know, I just was really inspired to take things on criticisms and all and just to keep plowing forward. And I think Grayson really shows the professional athlete discussion we had and how it can have broader meaning. She had to realize that the chasing results stuff was not the way she could do it. And I think that every professional athlete almost comes to that conclusion eventually. Grayson just did it really early because she had these deep thoughts. And a lot of it was almost because she faced these types of criticism that made her stress test the way she views the world. So I'm so inspired by Grayson. And actually, this reminds me that Zoey Rome, one of our absolute idols, she's an incredible writer, has an article coming out soon in Free Trail that's on her experience with criticism that amounted to abuse actually online and how it's changed her perspective on the world. And these women that are going out there, putting themselves out there and being vulnerable in the face of some of this heat and vitriol that's out there and responding with thin skin and skinness, that feeling. It is so cool and it gives us so many models for how we can exist in this complicated world. I feel like my brain case can make the idea of when that happens, just keep chopping. Yeah, just keep chopping. Just keep chopping. I think that's the moral of this episode in general. It's just like chop through technical trails, chop through the shit in life, chop through all the hard things that make us humans. It's great. But it's okay to take a few seconds and cry after you twist your ankle, which is your new approach. You're just so stoic and such a beast in life, but you'll twist your ankle. You'll stop and you'll be like, F word, F word, F word, a few tears. And then you're like, I'm fine. And then you keep running. Actually, I don't necessarily even cry. I just concoct all the different variations of the F word. I'm like fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. For like 30 seconds straight. And then I keep running. You don't cry. But you make it noises that approximate it. Like an animal dying in the woods. Yeah, exactly. Like an animal about to be turned into collagen. You're like Addy Dog after we're trying to be like, you know, you might be good for performance. Disassembled. But it's very interesting because then immediately after that passes, which I imagine is an initial pain response that I'm grace and feels, Zoe feels that we feel, you just start running again. You're just like, I'm fine. I got this. And sometimes you're not fine, right? And it takes a few days off and you have to rebuild. But eventually you're going to be fine. You just don't know exactly when that is. And I think that's a good lesson about criticism in general. Yeah, chop it all up. Chop it all up. We love you all. Whoo hoo. Ah. Thank you.