163. Courtney's Legendary Hardrock 100, Fueling Before Events, and Pre-Cooling!

Woohoo, welcome to the Summer Call Play podcast. We are so happy to be with you today. Happy Tuesday. Yeah, it's Tuesday. And it's a backwards hat Tuesday over here. The vibes are quick. What got you into the backwards hat? I didn't even recognize that before we got on the podcast. Of course, you don't recognize anything about hair or fashion. Every once in a while you like say something about like hair or fashion. I mean like what is happening right now? It makes my compliments seem so much better because usually I don't know to shit. Like I don't know, I had no idea what length your hair was when you're having a discussion with our friend the other day. I was like, it could be like at your ears or it could be at the like nape of your neck or it could be at your lower back. And I just would have no idea. Well, I should do a trial at some point and just shave my head and see if you notice. Just come in with like a shaved head a few more earrings and you'd be like, oh, just chatting about like the weather and the food and yeah, the good stuff. I'm surprised more athletes don't shave their heads, especially female athletes. It's just like, you know, even though I have a little bit of a frog going on, it's not that like non-arrow. But I feel like the really long hair that does go down to the low back isn't the perfect aerodynamic setup. Like every cyclist are going for every single little second. Swimmers shave every inch of their body. Why aren't you shaving your head if you want those performance gains? I should do that. Brittany Bitch was on to something. Oh yeah. Yeah, just go full Brittany Spears on it. Yeah, Bubby really curious to see if you notice it. But no, I'm wearing this backwards hat because my entire body, my entire existence right now feels a little bit disheveled. And the backwards hat is countering that. And it's, you know, it's working quite well. I actually feel good as we sit here recording. Well, you look beautiful and maybe on the cellular level, we don't feel beautiful. Because we're coming to you with tons of creatine kinase, CK muscle breakdown in our bodies from our race we did this weekend. Literally so many different parts of my body. Or sorry, I woke up this morning and my pecs were sore. Like what did I do in the race to use my pecs? Why are my pecs sore? It's kind of wild. My arms are actually quite sore too, including my left arm. And I was carrying my bottle in my right arm. So I don't know what this arm did during the race. But like I truly have no idea. Maybe I gave like a really good high five at some point. Maybe it's because I just realized post-race that now we have to parent post-race. And so we're like holding Leo in like all these different ways because our bodies are so sore. You absolutely trucked your ankle. Yes. And all like since the race you've been walking downstairs holding Leo very gingerly on the ankle. I'm like, dude, I don't know if this is the best idea. You better not fumble him. No mistakes yet, but there's still time. Encles rapidly healing and we have a lot of fun takeaways for you from the race. But first a quick roadmap of the best episode ever that we have coming. The first thing we're going to talk about lessons from our race, some funny ones, some serious ones, some science ones, how not to car blow that's on our race. A new study on blood volume and performance, some things that you need to know. Hard rock 100 thoughts and Courtney DeWalter's legendary performance. More stories and science from the Tour de France. We love that topic. Quick hitters on three interesting topics. You're going to love that stuff. Maybe a menstrual cycle study. And finally hot takes. I wonder how many times we've teased this menstrual cycle saying haven't gotten to it. It's something you guys have to get there. And DeWalter, I am so excited to talk about her yet again. And I'm just like, I'm bubbling over. I can't wait to talk about it. Yeah, we saw another greatest of all time performance just three weeks after Western states. Maybe one of them is remarkable athletic achievements ever. We're going to try to theorize a little bit on why it was possible. Like what makes Courtney Courtney? I mean, we were talking before. And it's like, is this even, like, Courtney has defied the laws of like human physiology over and over and over again? But with just three weeks between the nails, like, is this even possible? And we were speculating on our Patreon podcast last week as it was happening. And we were like, I don't think it's going to happen. Just not because we doubt Courtney. I mean, if you doubt Courtney, you're in the wrong big as odds. But because it's like, is that physiologically possible? Yeah, but what it reminds me of is back in the day when I was playing sports video games. And you could create a player. And if you had no constraints on it, you could just turn all the attributes up to 99, like the perfect attributes. And I feel like that's what Courtney is. So what we're going to speculate on is what those attributes could be, how we can all hopefully optimize them for ourselves, essentially taking a little bit of that create a player Courtney to Walter and applying it to ourselves. Literally everything. Also, I feel like in that create a player situation, you have personality too. And they just turn it up to 99 to create the most delightful humans. Because it's, I think it's curious, actually. I saw a post from Michaela Schiffer and talking about the SPs. And the fact that like, once you get to the top, so many people are rooting for you to fall down. Like I feel like sometimes that's like the nature of human existence. I don't think a single person does that for Courtney. I think everyone roots, I mean, it is okay if you do. I don't want to like single you out. But like, I root for Courtney so freaking hard. And I feel like so many people do too. Were you saying it was okay if someone roots against Courtney? Well, I mean, I don't want to be there and be like, you know, like fuck that brain process in your mind if you're sitting there, I mean, like I'm rooting against Courtney. Yeah, I think that you're essentially giving space for intrusive thoughts that we all have. If we all have intrusive thoughts. About everything. Yeah. But the thing is is like, I literally have zero intrusive thoughts about Courtney. And I have my brain is like a little bit of a shit show in there. I have never once been like, I hope Courtney, like, you know, false or something. Yeah. I mean, it is remarkable how great she is and how loved she is. And maybe it's part of her powers. Who knows? It'll be really interesting to think about and we'll get to that really soon. But first, we did our very first race together since the Tiger Claw race in 2021. I think that's like 22 months ago. A whole heart condition ago. A near death experience ago, a baby ago. So Megan, what happened at this race? It was so much fun. We finally got to race together. We did the Aspen Power of 425K, which literally starts straight the fuck up. It was insane. Within three seconds, you're going up to 20% grade. It was kind of a wild start. And so I was, we talked about this on our Patreon episode actually last week. I was a little daunted adding into this race. Like, I mean, I love the feeling of like being nervous and feeling pressure and I very much felt that. But it was fun to go through it together. Yeah. It was wild to get to the start line. And Megan wasn't joking around about three seconds. It might have even been less. It was probably about 10 feet. And then it started just a trail up a ski slope. And you said 20% that's actually undershooting it. Most of that first mile was 30 plus percent grade. And it is a little bit like, okay, I am going to enter the pain cave no matter how I approach this race, especially for a 25K, where we're looking at races between two and a half hours basically on this type of terrain. And you're just like, I am going to try not to think about what's ahead too much, but just enough so I'm prepared. How painful was it for you? Okay, so yeah, I mean, actually got quite painful. So for me, the climb took about 20 minutes the first climb. Which is bonkers fast, so fast, yeah. About halfway out, I was trying to make my move. And we might talk a little bit about the race how it unfolded. But my ears started popping. And when that happened, I definitely was going above lactate threshold. But what was weird about altitude is my heart rate was actually below where my lactate threshold heart rate usually is. Because when you're at that elevation, which we were getting up to 9, 10,000 feet, the hemodynamics essentially caused your lactate threshold to be a little bit suppressed. And so it was a really odd experience because it hurt. But my heart rate wasn't that high. But it did objectively hurt. And I specifically still remember it. Like I'm still in the brain state. How did it feel for you? Did it hurt? It didn't hurt, which is a little bit. I think I entered this weird place in racing, but I just kind of go kamikaze mode. I felt atrocious. The first three minutes, the women actually took it out, really fast. And I was not leading the race. And I was like, what is happening right now? And I actually was good though. My brain skipped going to that judgmental place, which sometimes I've gone to in races in the past. And I was purely like, OK, this is my reality. This is like what's going on right now. But I cleared some lactate after the first three minutes and felt really good. So I would say the first three minutes of the race, I was like, I am not prepared for this. My lights are sore. I'm already in the pain cave. And then from there, I felt great. It was curious. I think for me, we did a workout on Wednesday in Aspen, up Aspen Mountain. And that to me was way more painful than anything I went through during the race. That's so interesting. Yeah, and I mean, I think it's a good time for a spoiler, or Megan won. And not only did she win, she was third overall, just two men ahead. You did so fantastically. And I think part of it was the tone was set on that initial climb, because you let some people get away. And then you just entered hashtag team never hike mode. And you ran up this ski slope, which I think is an ultimate demoralizing thing for some of the people you run with. But was that your plan the whole way going in was just to try to run up these insanely steep grades? That was my goal. You never know until you see the grades. And you never know what's smart. But for me, I just walked into that granny gear and kept running and running and running. And it was empowering, because I was in third or fourth half mile in. And then the women started hiking. And I just kept running and I ran right by them. And it was so empowering. I almost don't want to give away the team never hike secret, because I'm like, what if they're listening? What if next time they're running? And I got to run past them while they're running. So I think it's a good lesson for everybody. It's not to run up ski slopes. That's not feasible for most people that don't have your backward hat in mitochondria. But just run up a few more steps than you usually do. And it's wild to me how much that adds up. It really does add up. And I think it's the variance in grade. And that maybe on the steepest parts of ski slopes, it doesn't really matter what you're doing, or wherever that inflection point is for most people. But if you're able to just run three more steps, usually that'll give you a second. And let's say you add up, you know, there's three steps to 300 steps. The gaps that you could do on your hypothetical self that hikes a little bit sooner can be pretty big. That relationship starts to fall apart in very long altres. But even then, like we try to encourage athletes of all levels, just run a couple more steps. And those couple steps might be on really steep, like Megan did, or they might be on flat ground. Like if you're someone that run walks, but that will still add up over time. And I think part of it is you have to bet on yourself. One thought I remember when I was going up those really steep grades was thinking, I really want to like not do that. I want to like hike, you know, and I resisted that urge, because hiking would have been just as hard for me. That's the thing. My heart rate would have been the same level. I just wouldn't go in a little slower. See, I got excited because I realized early on that I was running when they were hiking. Yeah. And so I got really excited the rest of the race whenever it went up really steep as like, I bet they're hiking. And I'm going to be running this. And for me, it actually made me look forward to hills like throughout the rest of the race. I was like, make it steep, make it hard, make it gnarly because I'm going to run these. And I think to me, that was a huge confidence level. But I think for me, also, it's not so much like running the 20% and 30% grade. It's that periodically, sometimes in those grades, it flips to 10% or 8%. And if you're already running, I think that transition becomes much faster. And your legs aren't carrying quite as much fatigue because, you know, the running at higher cadence, I think puts a little bit less stress on the legs in some shorter distances. I'm just so impressed by you. I mean, you know, you gave Earth like almost eight and a half months ago, so I'm like that now. And because of the difficulty of the post-partum process for every athlete, the post-partum running is a huge hard, right? It's so hard, yeah. And I mean, in what ways is it hard for you? I mean, literally everything. Literally, everything. Yes, yeah, everything. It's hard in some ways. It's very soft in other ways. From my neck, my back, my pussy, my crack, all of that. Yes, yes, yes. Very, very hard. Yes. Good. I'm glad that you're giving our listeners a real insight into how you feel. But because of that difficulty, you've had to be very controlled in your training approach. And you've been able to avoid injury, which is great. But at the same time, you know, we were talking before this race that like, you know, you said you kept saying, I'm at 70%, you know? Yeah. And like going into this race at 70% in your mind and still putting yourself out there and having fun in that process and then crushing it, that's just so cool and inspiring. Oh, thank you. Well, I don't know if I've ever reached at 70% before. Yeah. Like on the tip of athlete that I, in the past, I would have waited to 100% and be like, I need to be really ready to throw it down. But I think there's so much value in racing into fitness. Racing is a way to understand more about the body. Racing is a way to like, understand what you have to work on. And I wanted to go into this race with that mindset. And I think the rest of the year, like my mindset is, I want to lose spectacularly. I love it. Because I mean, I did win this race and that was great. But I wanted, my whole goal was Megan, like if you get fit with this race, I want you to be proud. I want you to learn. And for me, that's such a different spot to be. And I had to, I mean, I actually, so the race played out, I, I want to make a move on the first climb. Yeah. But then a woman caught me four miles into the race after a downhill that I kind of like, while I gagged. Downhills right now, like super technical steeped downhills, I've just been a little bit more cautious. Your various cracks don't accommodate the downhills quite as well as they, they might in a few months. Yeah, I got to make sure I don't crack my cracks. Yeah. It's exceedingly important part in running training. What's that done? There's that Japanese art where like when a mug cracks, and then they fill it in with like some sort of adhesive and then they rebuild it. I know exactly the word. That was your, yeah, I'm going to say you have a rough, Guinness, something like that. Yes, I was going to say the same thing. That's your body is essentially one of those with the cracks just held together with adhesives. But sometimes they filled in with gold. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm just going to glitter those crackled. Lots of sparkles there. That's, you should have gone into OBGYN. And then whenever you have to like, sew somebody back up after the fact, just like some sparkles be like, this is my artwork. Just bedazzle it a little bit. Yes, no, I actually loved OBGYN. I wanted, I wanted to go into it again. But no, anyways, a woman caught me at mile four. And I was just using them that happens. I think there is this judgmental part of my brain. That's like, oh, someone's caught you, you're going to lose this race. And I just turned around and I was like, how's your race going? Had a conversation never in my life. Have I ever had a conversation in the middle of a race? Ah, the kind of goes against the swap philosophy. Because as much as we uplift positivity and love and stuff, in races, all we say is you are awesome. We do not get into deep conversations about someone's life. Yeah, but she was legitimately awesome. And she motivated me. Yeah. And then I ran away. Yeah, then I ran away. You had to do what you had to do. It was empowering, but I've never been like that before. And I feel like everything that I've gone through has set me up for this moment to not be in my best place to be at 70% in a race and being caught and be like, hey, I'm here for this. This is a learning experience and I was excited about it. You know what it reminds me of? One of those baseball pitchers. So every once in a while, someone comes along, Jamie Moir, for our listeners out there that are baseball sickos. He was a left-handed pitcher. He pitched for the Phillies for a while too, so you might know him. But he threw 82 miles an hour. He couldn't break glass with his fastball, but he played for like 25 years because he just caught by on like, wiles and grit after a while. That's how I felt like you were feeling at 70%. It's like, you can get by on the wiles and grit, which is gonna be really fun when your 104 mile hour fastball comes back. It's just gonna be incredibly exciting. Well, I'm excited. And thank you. I mean, you had a great, I feel like coaching going into this race. You were telling me the exact right things I needed here because on the warm-up, you're like, hey, Megan, you're at 70%. But I need you to know that your 70% is pretty darn good. And that was exactly- I don't think I said pretty darn good. I think I said like, bonkers fucking amazing or something like that because it is. But I think it's hard when any athlete is like evaluating themselves based on almost any metric. You know, and like, for you, it's so hard because you've achieved these world-class levels before. And like, will you get back there, yes. But right now, it's a process. So I wanted your expectations to be controlled going in, but also to know, you're a fucking beast. And even if you lose, especially if you lose, it's just a step in the process of your beasthood. Like, and that's why I loved when you said your goal is losing spectacularly this year because that's where the growth happens. And that's, I mean, and even going forward, when I'm at 100%, I wanna lose spectacularly. And I will. And I'm excited for that. And there's been so many athletes like Rachel Drake, she's eight months postpartum as well. And she's put herself, she's put herself in the Golden Trail series. She's put herself at Broken Arrow on so many different races that have been highly competitive. And I think she's been a big inspiration to me in this process too. But okay, I wanna talk about you. Because you are at like 110%. You were soaking up all those percentage points for our family. And how did you feel out there? I felt, okay, I felt good. But I do wanna give myself a couple props just really quick before we get to actual takeaways for everybody else. Which is the climb starts up the ski slope. And that really calls on your VO2 max, even in these longer races. It's the type of thing that that's a young man's game right here at the ski slopes, right? But here in 2023, I had done this race in 2016 and 2017 when I was like 28 years old. And my time beat my time then. So in 2016, I was at the peak of my powers. I thought it was probably one of the peaks of my life when a national championship that year like won a bunch of big races. And today, or this weekend, I beat my time. And what gets me excited about that is that's seven years later. And I hope, and I think I can beat my time from this year when I'm 42. I believe so. Actually, I think you've been, you're so twitch muscle fibers are just on that sexy journey. But, okay, so you beat your time on the first climb. And you also didn't die post-race. So the last time you did this race and you ran so hard on the uphill, I really need to, I don't think the story has ever come out on the podcast. And it needs to come out on the podcast. You got so sick because you weren't hydrating at all through the rest of the race. And I- I also just was going too hard. Yeah, and this race, like you went hard and you were able to recover and clear that lactate. So, also clearly your physiology isn't a good spot. But we were driving home and you were just like so sick after this race. Back in 2016. And you're like, Megan, I need you to urgently pull over. And there's like nowhere to pull over. We're on this like busy road coming down from Snowmass and I pulled over and you just shot all over the ground of the road. And that didn't happen this time. You were fine. Yeah, that didn't happen. That was one of the worst experiences of my life. It was so painful. And it was so painful for so long after that race. And that's one of those moments that don't get ridden up in running magazine. Which is like, you know, at that race, there's pictures of me on the podium that were in like Iron Farbeys that used to be like a sky running serious race. And I think everyone's like, oh, look at that glorious performance. What they don't see is me being like, Megan, pull over, stop. And then just like all over the guardrail. And- And you know what, that's love. Yeah. Because I loved you so much in that moment. It's like, well, you were delightful and hilarious. Yeah, and I was like, damn, that must hurt. Yeah, it did hurt. I was also like, yeah, my microbiome is all over Snowmass called, I don't know. There's trees might have gotten some good lessons there. But yeah, so it was a really cool experience. And we wanted to have some interesting takeaways that I think applied to everyone. The first is on how not to car-blood. Because this might be relevant for your own car-blooding. So we always talk about in the day before races, it's really key to have eight to 12 grams per kilogram. So kilogram of body weight, grams of carbohydrates. Because that highly correlates with the performance. There's several studies looking at ultra runs and marathons that find that athletes that are able to hit that range, outperform athletes lower by substantial margin. But most athletes won't be at that range without a little bit of focus. So we were like, we are gonna be science back. We are gonna do this. Megan said when I was at the grocery store, hey David, get some mac and cheese, perfect lunch. And then when at, before the race, you're like, oh, you know what, pasta the night before. That makes sense too. So we did that. But both of them were bonza chickpea pasta. And so what we didn't really account for was that we had about 1,500 calories a piece of pure beans. The only ingredient in bonza chickpea pasta, which is probably good, is chickpeas. But all of a sudden I was like, shit, we just had so many beans. And we realized it kind of the night before when our stomach started feeling a little oily, that oh wait, this is in chest pasta. This is like a very special type of pasta that might not absorb quite as well because it also came with like triple digits fiber, basically. So it was giving me a little bit of like nice feelings, though, is that you know the line, like beans, beans, they're good for your heart, the more you eat, the more you fart. And like, well I'm farting right now, but you know what, they're good for my heart. And I need all of the heart good vibes I can get. So maybe it's safe my heart trying the race. That's true, maybe. They are the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you too. So think about that in your own races, like playing in the day before. Don't do it like we did where you're kind of flying by the sea to your pants and you're just kind of getting day to day. Well, we were traveling and we were like, what's available. We, I don't think, I think we certainly would have realized that at home. But it was like one of those things I was on a Zoom call, like just make me some mac and cheese. And then I housed like the entire box of mac and cheese that was so delicious. So honestly, I don't regret it. Were there any negative outcomes for you? Oh, very much negative outcomes. Okay, but not during the race though. Not during the race. Actually, I got it, I got it all out before the race. The race started at 9 a.m. That's true. Actually, a bit of it at 5 a.m. race, that went a bit hard. Yeah, we would have been making the other racers look like guardrails. It's not been pleasant. But do think about this. Like this science is unequivocal that that in the day before your race is pretty key. We like athletes to start thinking about it than dinner two nights before. So let's say your race is on Saturday on Thursday night, a little bit carb heavier than usual, day before a little bit even more carb heavy. What I like a lot is having sports strength throughout the day. So usually we have about three Gatorades of peace to just keep the carbs coming in a sustainable way. And next time we're not going to have the equivalent of five cans of beans. Which is so fun. I actually look forward to this day because it's like, I get to have three cool blue Gatorades. I feel like cool blue Gatorades, the first ingredient, it's not chickpeas, it's cool blue. Yeah. It's like blue 18. Yeah, exactly. Blue 18 is the key to athletic performance. It's essentially what we're trying to say here. A second is on cooling mechanism. So this race had very high sun exposure. It was quite warm. Megan is on autoimmune medication that makes her sensitive to sun. So we need to think about this even more. While she is on a medication, I'm just on that like polar bear game. I kind of just suck shit and heat. So we thought about this a lot. We did our warm up like 45 minutes before so that we would have time to do our pre-cooling. And remember the science of pre-cooling also pretty unequivocal here. In Megan, how do we pre-cool? So you pre-cooled. We were filling up glasses of water. And I felt bad actually because they had limited water. And I was like, David, you're stealing all their precious resources. And then we were dumping it on each other. But you particularly love the surprise effect. So you're like, I'm going to turn around Megan. And I don't want to know when the water is coming. And then you kept squealing like a baby every time it tossed it on to you. And I was like, you know, I don't know if it's the pre-cooling. Maybe it's actually the squealing like a baby. That's good for underlying physiology. They say the shock response is quite important. And for me, it always is best on the neck. So if you're out there, it's not just cooling during events that matters. It's also pre-cooling. So what Megan I did is we kept grabbing these cups of water. And we would like pour it on the other person's neck and back. But then also what we would do is we would not neglect the cracks. I was going to say, I was like, I hope the cracks are coming in. So we were in the shade. And like we would lean back and just like kind of like spreadie our legs in butterfly position. And then the other person would just go, boom. And there were lots of people watching us do this. So probably in actually a number of podcasts listeners that came up to us. So we apologize for using that. But it was quite shocking and quite delightful. It was also a little embarrassing too. And maybe that fed it. It was like, you need shock and embarrassment and cold water. And all three of those go together in a synergistic effect. But actually, I was a little embarrassed doing this. And then halfway up the climb, I was like, embarrassment gone. Jokes on them. I feel good right now. Yeah. And remember, cooling, cooling, cooling. It is so beneficial for athletic performance. So much of what we think is like hydration issues or things like that is just the body getting a little bit higher temperature, which is going to negatively impact performance. I think final, maybe sport, like take away on the training is on altitude exposure. So this race got up to exactly 10,000 feet. A place where you have not always performed well in the past. And you absolutely fucking crushed it this time. What was going on other than the iron and take that we talked about last week? Thank you. Well, I've been sometimes a taking time bomb at altitude. Sometimes I have variable altitude responses. And it's really hard to predict. And I don't know what that is with my physiology. But I usually feel like at sea level, I'm pretty consistent. And altitude is kind of a grab bag of performances, which also may be a little nervous standing on a start line. I was like, I just don't know how I'm going to respond. But we got to ask them early. And I think that was really, really helpful. Because there's a big difference. We've been at 12,000 feet quite a lot in training. But there's a big difference between sleeping at altitude. And for me, I really felt that like the first few days of our trip, I was like, oh, man, I feel altitude right now and getting there early was so helpful. Yeah, and I totally agree. And I've seen this in coaching too. I think some of the conventional wisdom is not exactly correct in an applied sense, where they'll say either get there the day before or get there two weeks before. For me, I'm like, get there as early as you can, even if it's two days, three days, four days, whatever. Because the initial response that the body has to altitude can be quite shocking. So when a person is exposed to altitude, blood volume can drop substantially by 15% sometimes, which is huge. Even more, it varies a lot. I was really thinking and studying from frontiers of physiology that the individual response has a huge amount of variability. But for me, at least, I do feel like I'm under water, even going up a couple thousand feet after one night of sleep. So get up there early, reestablish your baseline. And I think it can really help. And every athlete responds so differently to altitude too. And I wonder if some of that is reflected in the changes in blood volume. If athletes that really struggle getting to altitude have a protracted blood volume response or how that works and how that interacts with an athlete's underlying physiology. It was really interesting to see the scatter in that study because it did go both directions. And you might be the type of athlete that can ignore this wisdom altogether. But I think sometimes it just helps to ground yourself in things that are real in the real world that you can touch, which for me is when we came back from Aspen to Boulder. So Aspen's up at 8,000 feet. Boulder's here around the mile high. We had a thing of coconut, or not coconut. French vanilla creamer, as I do, traveling with it. You know, it's totally safe to have in un-refrigerated places because the shit is an industrial solvent. But the entire thing imploded by the time we got to Boulder. So the whole thing was sucked in. And that's just dropping 3,000 feet of elevation. Now think about what that's doing to your arterial blood flow and things like that. So more exposure always better if it's possible. Also, I think it's the point that sometimes counterintuitively, when you go from high altitude down to lower altitudes, sometimes athletes feel like shit in the first two days. And I think it's because also there's so much change happening in terms of like blood volume and pressure and all these different things that, even though you're dropping down, sometimes athletes feel like crap for the first two days. What would you recommend? So you think that recommendation can change a little bit depending upon what altitude you're going to. So I have a bunch of athletes that race in Leadville. We've race in Leadville before. Would you make that same recommendation for a place that's at like 10,500 feet? Yeah, I would generally say, try not to stay above 8500 too long. Yeah. So for them, I think closer to two days might actually work a little bit better. Yeah, but if they can, get to 8500. Yes, exactly. Have a base camp that's a little bit more manageable. Soly because any amount of days at 10,000 feet in your body will start to wear away unless you're a super responder, like Courtney DeWalter, who lives at Leadville. The fact that she lives in Leadville blows my mind. Yeah. And it gets back to some of the weird physiology here. OK, one last. OK, yes. Are we going at the same spot on this last point? I think we're both going to food. No, I was going to ankles. Oh, no. Which kind of your ankle looks like a food stuff at the moment. Yeah. So we're kind of going to the same spot. Your ankle looks like a sausage. Yes, definitely a bratwurst ankle. And I crushed some sausages, posteries. I had like five sausages, posteries. And it was the first time in my life that I was ever like, you know, I'm getting a little sick of sausages at the moment. I went up to the sausage booth, which they had after the race. And literally, it was just like, give me all the sausages you have, because they weren't out yet. They were still on the grill. And it reminded me of the Ron Swanson thing from Parks and Recreation, where he's like, give me all of the bacon and eggs you have. And he's like, I don't think you understand. I mean, all of them. And that's exactly what I did, because I got you five sausages and got sausages for, you know, your athlete, Hannah, and Caitlin, who is our really good friend there. And so we were the sausage king and queen. And you also got all the ketchup. Yes. You really scored big in that department. I also got sick of sausage, which was tough. I've never been in that situation in my life and never hoped to again. But anyways, my point is that your ankles look like sausages now. And I think we learned an important lesson for both of us. Somehow, I'm miraculously, I've been spreading my ankles. We've been talking about this in the podcast. My ankles are floppy beach balls of shit. And I've been splining them so much. But in this race, they were unscathed, which is great. And I think it's because I double wrapped my ankles in tape and helped a ton. But we ran out of tape and you were so kind and generous and let me have the tape and you truck your ankle. Yeah. The delivery is not dead, but it has torn ankle ligaments. That's for sure. No, my ankle's going to be fine. The general rule of ankles is that even if they really hurt and they're really debilitating and they balloon up a lot, they're not that bad usually, unless you can't bear weight at all pretty much right after. So like, if after the race, I finished and I just had to get on crutches or just couldn't walk, those are the ones that are usually quite weak. And for this one, I'll be dealing with it for a week or two, but I'll be able to get back to running. So I'm not too worried about it, but I will be taping my ankles on every single trail run in the future. We just invested in the most advanced tape that we could find. We'll report back on that specific brand and see how it goes. Spoiler alert, duct tape. Duct tape. I'm just kidding. But we were in the grocery store, so we ran out of tape and so I went to the grocery store to see if I could get you some tape and they had duct tape. And I was going to come back with duct tape and I was like, maybe not a good idea to try something new on race day. But I'd be really curious to see what happened if we duct taped our ankles. I think we could probably duct tape over the sock and be fine. Maybe really interesting. Yeah. Maybe we should experiment with a little shake out and see what happens. We'll see what happens. Okay, so we're in a traumatic state right now with our bodies recovering. But the final thing I wanted to reflect on is that today we're recording this on Monday will be my fourth rest day in eight days, yours as well. And I think it just points out every chance you get in these longer term cycles to rest, know that it is improving adaptation as long as you're training at other times. So hopefully both of us will be ready to rock training in the future. But whatever happens, you know, those four rest days will be things that are additive to our fitness and growth. So if you're in a similar situation where you're racing or life's busy or anything like that, just it's fine to rest like half the days in a week or something, you're gonna just get stronger. But that takes a little bit of courage to understand that that's how the physiology works in these longer term cycles. It's such a nice insurance policy. Like for me, I'm still not musculoskeletically confident in my body. Postpartum, you know, it's been a journey. Postpartum running is challenging and I wish we had more nuance in how we talked about this. But for me, I was like going into this race. It was like my ABC and D-Gole one is to lose spectacularly and two is to be able to run on Tuesday. And I feel like these rest days are just great insurance for that and trusting and having faith in the body. And I feel like for me, they also help mentally as well. Like I can sleep at night and be in a deep state of trauma and be like, well, I'm resting. It should be okay by Tuesday. Yeah, I love it so much. Okay, let's get to a quick science hitter before we get to the Hard Rock 100. This was a 2023 study that just came out in the metabolites journal, fun journal name. And it's called the relationship between blood volume, blood lactate quantity and lactate concentrations during exercise. And it was in 26 female athletes. Yeah, it's really fun to see like research coming out on female athletes in exercise physiology and just female athletes. I was excited about that. But what they did was they gave these female athletes an incremental cycling test. And in that process, they measured VO2 max, they measured lactate concentrations, hemoglobin mass and blood volume. Yeah. So a bunch of helpful parameters and I think it's fun to think about the relationships between all of these and that was their goal was to assess the relationships between blood volume and blood lactate and how that's changing over an exercise duration. Yeah. And so this study, as I was reading it, was mostly about how to do these protocols in the lab. So it wasn't necessarily trying to apply it to training theory. This was kind of an intermediary step. But I think it's helpful to think about as we understand performance more generally. So, quote, two quotes from the study. We calculated that the exercise induced blood volume shifts significantly reduced lactate transport capacity by 10.8%. And that's not a good thing, necessarily. So, blood volume decreases during exercise. And that's not something you necessarily, you want to try to prevent some of that. And then finally, moreover, the blood lactate transport capacity might be significantly reduced by the shift in plasma volume that happens during exercise. That's backed up by a 2021 study in frontiers of physiology that found blood volume markedly decreases until maximum exhaustion affecting the stroke volume response or how the heart beats during exercise. So, as you pointed out, we don't want the lactate transport capacity to reduce. Like, we need to be able to transport and to shuttle that lactate because lactates used as a fuel source. We also need to be able to clear lactate. So, many reasons in which we want that to be working optimally. But I think for me, I find this curious because so often, as we're exercising, our blood volume drops or plasma blood volume because of dehydration. And to me, I was like, I was someone that I'm not always the best with hydrating during exercise. I was like, hydration matters so much. Because hydration is not just what we're thinking about in terms of hydrating the body. It's related to blood volume and it's related to lactate. And that's gonna help me continue to think about hydration so much more. Yeah, and you did great at the race with that, which is really interesting, especially because blood volume becomes a key consideration in altitude. And especially because I was being chased. And I had to stop at an aid station and fuel up my body in a 25, fill up my flask in a 25k, which is my nightmare. And you stopped. And I did it. It's like a woman at a bus stop saying, hi, to the every... Very rare for me. Yeah, it's incredible. But I think it does underscore, even though this study, we're zooming it out in a way that maybe it's not meant to be exactly. But I do think it underscores yet again, the importance of blood volume. So a few months ago, we talked about a study that came out that did an intervention where they had athletes do a VO2 max protocol over six weeks. And they saw the usual fitness improvements that you always see in these studies. But then they did one more step where they did a blood draw and reduced their blood volume to the same levels it was at the start of the intervention. So six weeks before, all of the fitness increases vanished. So the point being what they thought was like the VO2 max training was essentially acting on the hemodynamics of the body, on the blood. So we want to be constantly thinking about, not just ways we can improve our blood volume over time increase it because it does increase pretty substantially. We also want to think about how we can improve it during exercise and prevent reduction. So hydration is great, heat training is great, cooling is great, all of these cooling mechanisms we talked about. And then you can kind of combine these to just think about, I want to be a big ball of blood. If you can do that, you're going to be so much better off. You're the sexiest, biggest ball of blood, David. I mean, we know we've seen your markers. You have really high hemoglobin and hematocrit and a little bitch because mine are a lot lower. But I mean, I think that's really cool. But I also think it's important as we're talking about the altitude conversations, we said before that blood plasma volume can drop 15% at altitude and sometimes even more for people. And if you're already having those drops in blood plasma volume at altitude, hydration at altitude becomes even more important because that's going to drop even more during exercise and that's all going to impact lactate shuttling. So let's get hydration on more. And more volumes, wow, because it can drop seasonally by about the same amount, like 15% in most people across the population in winter. So in winter, heat training is more important. But also in summer, you want to maintain that heat stimulus. And my open question here that the research is somewhat uncertain on, I have my opinions as a coach, is that once an athlete is considering this blood volume drop that happens at altitude, doesn't help to counter that with heat exposure once you get to altitude. And so the research generally says, you don't want to combine heat and altitude too much because it's too much stress. I somewhat disagree based on what I've seen where when an athlete gets to altitude, what I recommend is if you can, take like a really warm shower or warm bath or hot tub in a couple days after, and it seems to help their performance, though I might be kind of thinking about it in too much of a simplistic way. Well, can you explain the potential? Oh, no. I can't explain anything. I was like, I want to understand the mechanism behind that because it sounds a little bit counterintuitive. So if you're going to altitude, and then you're doing a heat training stimulus, which is going to dehydrate your body, how does that work in terms of improving hemodynamics? Well, so blood volume drops at altitude. And the heat exposure increase blood volume. So as long as you're hydrating it, fun. But it drops blood volume and then increases blood volume. The compensatory mechanism that happens after initial heat exposure. Because studies also show that just a few heat exposures increase blood volume like 17.8%. So can that counter some of the loss and make you feel a little better? Maybe I'm thinking about it in too simplistic a way, but whenever I've had an athlete's race up there and had a ton of success, usually it does involve a little bit of heat exposure after they get there. Well, you take this very seriously. We get to altitude and you're like, I must hot shower. I love, because your brain is on overdrive. And that's one of the reasons I love you is you're brilliant, you're always thinking. And it's kind of cute and you're like, I need to get in the hot shower. I like the term overdrive. It kind of reminds me of our old crush trek that got stolen. Like whenever it was going up, one of these big mountain passes. And I had to hit the gas a little bit and it went into overdrive. It just started just like creaking and making noises. It's kind of what my brain does when it over thinks and combines studies that perhaps shouldn't be combined. No, your brain's like our new outback. Oh yeah. Our new outback is smooth. It gets smooth. It tells pretty well. Yeah, it's great. Okay, thank you. That's the best compliment you've ever done me. Do you want to get to hard rock 100 thoughts? I'm so excited. We can finally talk about Courtney. It's been great. Actually, Courtney has been giving us so much podcast content. I know. Thank you, Courtney. You were doing the Lord's work for us. It's great. Getting that hashtag content is the key. Yeah, actually, when we put her in the title for our Western States episode, I'm not sure if it was just because of the Western States episode or because Courtney was in the title, but the episode got so many listens. It was bonkers. We should just do a year of Courtney. Yeah. I don't like Courtney's heat training. Even, I mean, she doesn't give a ton of, actually, she gave us some, when we interviewed her, she gave us some answers as to what she does, but we should just speculate on everything for a year and see what it does for our podcast. You know, reminds me of when you're in the, I've said that a lot of this podcast, but that I've just been reminded of so many things. When you're at the supermarket checkout counter and you see like an us weekly and every single week, it seems like the us weekly is about the same cast of characters. It's like, Brittany does this. Blake Sheldon and Gwen Stefani do this. Killian, that was us weekly from like 2015. We haven't seen it not this weekly in a long time. We've been ordering groceries, gotta be honest. But the interesting point to me is that, you know, we could do the same with like Killian because they're probably just doing, they're just probably trying to get those numbers, right? That's true. Hashtag content. We could do it with Alex Honald. Yeah. Actually, we were laying in bed last night and it was like five minutes before we were going to sleep and you're like, hey, Megan, Alex Honald emailed today. And I was like, what? Why is this coming out in bed? They should have come out many hours ago. The only place in Alex Honald email should come out is in bed. That is the only answer. The contents of that email, they're just gonna remain between all of us. But I like that you mentioned it because you know what? Getting his email in the inbox, the like ultimate idol we have for Baby Leo. We want Baby Leo to like look up to men like him and women like Courtney. It's pretty special. It was really special. But it was like, it took longer than 30. I mean, it took probably three hours before you told me. And I was like, what is wrong with you right now? I mean, what better form of four play though? Yeah, it worked. Yeah. Okay, hard rock one. It was an insane course and here this year. You're shocked. I'm shy and shocked. This is like the water response. Yeah. You really needed the shock or something. Yeah, exactly. So thank you Alex. So it was hot this year in a relatively unexpected way. You know, they were dealing with a lot of the same heat. We were dealing with an Aspen. Our race was much shorter, more shaded. It got up to about the 80 degrees there. 80 degrees at 14,000 feet or 80 degrees at 10,000 feet where the race was going through a lot of the time. It feels like you're on the surface of the sun. It's hard to explain exactly but your skin literally bakes. The sun feels like it's deep frangy like bacon. Yeah, like the sausage is actually. And it all comes full circle back to sausage. It all comes back to sausage. Yeah. Yeah, I imagine if you stayed out long enough, your skin would actually start to like blister relatively quickly. There's less atmosphere obviously between you and that sun and that causes performance decreases. So when we talk about cooling, the reason we talk so much about water on your skin is because of the interaction of like the actual temperature with the skin response. It's not just core, right? So your skin temperature ends up incorporating into your core body temp relatively quickly. That can happen fast. And so these athletes face that. And not only that though, it was also very snowy after a tough winter. And very mucky too. Sometimes it's even worse than snow when you're going through that like deep trenches of muck and then your shoes become five pounds. Yeah. So oh my god, the conditions out there look so rough. I read from a piece that had a panic attack on Grant Swamp pass. Wow. Yeah, just from the conditions, being scary, high exposure in tough areas. Well, I went to the Hard Rock course, right? And they in intricate detail describe everything about the course, which is fun. You should actually, it kind of reads like a fun novel. So you should go read it like if you're curious about the Hard Rock course. But it also gives you so much appreciation for what they're going through. And I want to read this really brief quote from from the past. And this is how they described it for Grant Swamp pass. The most consistent footing is along the top of the ridge where you may occasionally encounter remains of the terrain. The small rock and dirt mixture will slide with you and could be great fun going down. Snow in the goalies are on either side of the ridge and they may entice you to glissade down it. This is fine. This is fine. And I love that this is fine commentary. As we were out there drawing the race and there were some pretty technical portions on our course. I was like, this is fine. Chilling my inner hard rock. That's what I thought when my ankle was the size of like three beach balls and still is. So yeah, I mean, absolutely wild race. And while we were recording our Patreon episode last week, so reminder, every single Friday, we do a bonus 30 minute episode where we answer listener questions and get down and dirty into details that might not even come out on the radio. It's dirtier in this podcast. Yes, somehow. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, full of our deepest darkest secrets. And we also answer questions there on messages and do sexy signs corner posts. So patreon.com slash swap S.A.A.P. Great place to support the podcast. But well, during that episode, we were recording in the start of the race and Courtney was behind at that point. She was in second place. She was behind by almost my more than 10 minutes, at some point. Yeah, we speculated at the moment. It's like, is this the time that we think Courtney might not have that breakthrough day, right? And it was very conceivable because as we talked about, like what she is doing is truly, like I mean, I'm speechless because it seems impossible. Yeah. And when she was 10 minutes down and she was actually 10 minutes down as we were recording the podcast, we're like, this, it's impossible. Yeah. And I mean, the Iron Far reports, like the Twitter feed was saying things like, you know, she's running a little bit gingerly. So she's happy, but running gingerly on the downhill. And that's what you would expect from a normal athlete. But Courtney is not a normal athlete. And sure enough, she goes and beats the course record at Hardrock and she finishes her own course record. By 30 minutes, yeah. So she now has course, so Hardrock is running different directions, kind of like doing a track workout just at Hardrock. And she has the records now in both directions. And so she just absolutely annihilated expectations. Totally made the Patreon speculation that I was doing about, you know, like if I was a betting man and you could put $1 down at 100 to 1 odds on some crazy thing happening, it might be that this is the moment that like we see physiological realities happen. That dollar got taken away from me because she crushed shit. It was remarkable. Ran up all the way through the field, set the all-time record in the Western States Hardrock 100 double, crushing the men's best time. But you know, it just points out, is there anything Courtney can't do? No. Yeah, that's the answer. Courtney for president. That's the answer. Courtney for president. And I think it would be fun. Actually, we came to this idea independently and then we were with like, this is what we want to do for the podcast. Yeah. Is speculating about what goes into Courtney. Yeah. Because I think like from a training theory perspective, there's a lot of fascinating like hypotheses as to like what happens to make Courtney the Walter dialed on everything. Yeah. And okay, I love this idea. Let's break it down into two different things. The first is the acute performance abilities. We're going to the Western States or Hardrock alone indicate some sorts of abilities that kind of make those physiological realities like inevitable essentially. But then second, I think maybe the most interesting speculation will be on what allows that recovery between events and allows her to get back instead of course, Dr. just three weeks later, when like most of the athletes we coached at Western States that had amazing days and were in the top 10 are still just getting back to their first double digit runs. Let alone triple digit runs. I love that idea. And I think there's also like if we had a vent diagram of those two, I think the overlap between the two is huge too. Yeah. Okay, so first acute, we'll just kind of brush over this a little bit because I think it's a little less important. You know this if you listen to the podcast. The first is that her lactate threshold and her aerobic threshold are both sky high. She has to be efficient and she has to have high output. And if you remember our episode with her, she talks about doing things like four minute hill repeats, like five by four minute hill repeats. So she's working on this top end even as she does like a little bit less structured training. I think she has structured unstructured training. Exactly, yeah. She's her coach. She's her own coach and she's a great coach. Not just someone that's going out and jogging in the mountains all day. And if you think about it too, Western States is a fast course and she ran so fast. Her rock very different course. Her rock is a grinding course. And so her ceiling in terms of VVO2 also has to be relatively high as well. I mean, actually be curious to see, what kind of 5K do you think Courtney could run? Who I've been actually insanely fast. Yeah, especially if she trained, I think if she had a six week training block for a 5K and put her in drag and fly spikes, I think she'd run pretty fast. Yeah. There's a good question actually. I, I, controversial, maybe statement. I think she could probably run like 1530 in 5K with six weeks, like as wild as that is. That's how. In the shortening shorts. In the shortening shorts. Do you think those convert well to a 5K? They would, though, it kind of is counter to what I said about shaved heads with arrow. Because I feel like the short knees are less aerodynamic because there's just a lot of short there. But maybe it's cooling, get all the wind flow in your nether regions. Yeah, yeah, I like it. Yeah, I really like it. Okay, number two, she must be incredibly metabolically efficient with sky high lipid metabolism. My guess is if we measured her in a lab, we would see that she's able to burn fat at very, very high outputs. This is probably a combination of training. A little bit of gender in there, too, is that we are going that women often have higher lipid metabolism than men. And it's, I think it's really cool to see Courtney embody this. Yeah, and she could be kind of, her and Camille, Karen, could be two examples of athletes that are kind of harnessing some natural physiological variation between men and women. Just start pushing the limits of what's possible and then running up through the tops of these international men's fields as a result. I love that. And I think for me, the third point is building on that is fatigue resistance. And I think lipid metabolism and also what we talked about too in terms of lactate, thrashal and aerobic thrashal also built into that too. But if Courtney did tie her 20, so if she went out and ran a long run and then we had her do a 20 minute time trial at the end of that, I think she performed so well. I bet she did that 20 minute fresh versus tired. I think the decay would be minimal between the two of those. And I think she's outstanding at that. And that's partially training, partially nervous system issues. Maybe genetic, yeah. You can go back to our episode 83 for a whole science breakdown of fatigue resistance and our theories for it. I love that you know that at the top of your head. That is Subaru Outback game. Yes, I love that. I was referring people to that episode because I think that shows the complication of this. In fact, we're probably going to get to a study in just a few minutes on cyclist interability that points out how little we know about this variable. And last week we talked about muscle activation in the VMO and the quad muscle after these types of short events and saw that women perform a little better than men. So this could be another place where Courtney's harnessing that. So outstanding running economy, we can just brush her over that real quick. And then finally, a little bit of theory here, she must have in my opinion a low sweat rate. I'd love to know what her lab numbers are on sweat tests. I would love what to know her lab numbers and everything. That's so true, yeah. Let's put it, I don't think, I mean, Courtney, when we interviewed her, I don't think she's even had her blood work done. I would love to know what her hemoglobin and matricut numbers are. I mean, she lives up in Leadville. Yeah. And I think that actually feeds into a lot of these variables too. She's incredibly altitude adapted. And how that feeds into her lipometabolism, how that feeds into all these other variables, I think we're just beginning to understand. Yeah, it would be so fun to get to see all the physiology that makes this superhuman possible. And the low sweat rate for me, I've just seen in a number of athletes that have gone sweat tests, some correlation with fatigue resistance and low natural sweat rates. And that doesn't mean that if you have a high sweat rate, you're doomed to have poor fatigue resistance. I think it just must mean there's a lot more margin, or there's a lot more margin for error with the low sweat rate. So my sweat rate is very high. I don't know if all her... We haven't tested it though. We should test it. Yeah, we'll do it soon, but I mean, it's insane. Like it's obvious based on, you know, I'll lose in the old days when I used to weigh myself like 10 years ago, I would lose like 10 pounds in an hour, 10 minutes or something, on outside and hot weather on the East Coast. So those are our acute performance theories. Now let's go to what makes the recovery possible for someone like this. And I think this is the most interesting point. The first is relates to the trauma we talked about in our own bodies, where our creatine kinase is super high and muscle breakdowns high. I bet you ours might be higher now, than Courtney says, both side rock. And I'm sure her pecs aren't. So we're like, we're in our, yeah. I mean, so after Western states, there's a study that was in 2012 in the Wilderness Environmental Journal or something like that, that found that the average CK levels were 32,000. The types of levels that if you presented to a emergency room, they would admit you. Yeah, they'd be like, we're gonna hospitalize you for six days. Yeah, yeah. And that's the average. Courtney's has to be lower, because there's 32,000 numbers would not make it possible to double back to something like hard rock. I don't think, right? Like it probably wouldn't. I mean, you could probably clear that, I mean, when you look at the rate of decay of CK, you would have that cleared by a hard rock, but you would think like just all the processes of being ripped up wouldn't be great for a performance three weeks later. Yeah, so she must have an ability to withstand some sort of breakdown or clear it really fast, who knows exactly. Or maybe it's intrinsic to her running form. Yeah. I mean, her shuffle. So the way that she runs, I think, really prevents and limits breakdown. And so I'd be curious to know if some of that is related to how she runs. Yeah. And then she must be harmoniously resilient. This can be a mix of a bunch of different factors. It can be things like fueling, being really good. Her fueling must be outstanding. I mean, she gets those burritos. Yeah. There's so many good burrito pictures. Actually, whenever I do presentations now on low-energy availability, I just pop a Courtney burrito picture. Oh, really? Yeah, it's great. What a good role model. But that must be outstanding. Partially, it must be genetic. Just because you have to also have the genetic cards in your favor for this type of thing to work. Otherwise, no amount of wanting it can make it possible unless you also have that element met. And I wonder if that hormonal context feeds into the fact that she's been pretty injury-resilient over the years. I mean, she had a hip injury at Western states, I think, in 2019. But other than that, she's had consistency in training. And I think that's reflected in her fueling, probably her genetic baseline for hormonal values. And everything that she does in terms of her intuitive understanding of training. Definitely. And then I just love to see the biomarkers here. Yeah. Because her biomarkers, like we talk about that all the time, because it's so important for early athletes, it must be dialed. But if it was different than expected, like if every number wasn't just our definition of perfect, I think that that might be a clue into things that might actually be optimal. Because I just can't see a world where Courtney has is not the optimal. Yes. Well, I also think we also, in this process, we're talking so much about biomarkers and genetics, but right alongside that, and it's probably even, I feel like her mental state, and how she approaches training and racing, and just the fact that she's a freaking delightful human, probably feeds into all of that, too. And I think that's a huge, huge piece of this equation, is the idea that she's just a delight. Yeah. I mean, she is an incredible human, and I feel like that also has to help this process, too. Yeah, it's just so cool. And so I think the inspiration from Courtney is partially that mental end, that you can put yourself out there and have fun and be delightful, even while you're going for the top end. And then also, she's worked so hard for all of this. And none of this is given to her. She has just put in so much time and so much investment in herself and so much intuitive listening to her body. So even while we talk about these variables, remember that we can optimize each of our own individual statuses within these variables. We can optimize our individual Courtney's. Yeah. Oh my God, that's my whole goal. I just want Leo. I really need to put a photo of Leo. Leo's middle name should be Courtney. Actually, there's a bunch of men named Courtney in the world. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Or maybe we can name our second kid, just name them Courtney. Oh, that'd be great. Alex Courtney. Also, I love. You're just like, we're just going to have a second kid. I love it. I accepted it. I totally understood that my life is going to be like totally different in the future. And it's okay. I'm so happy over here. Okay, a couple of other random things from Hard Rock. The men's winner was Aurelian Denon Poulas. Ran a fantastic race all around. He went out. He was leading in the first mile and then led the entire race from there. What? Is it getting courageous way to race Hard Rock? And he did it so well. That's baller. Yeah. And that's the last we're going to talk about the men's race because I feel like sometimes you should just like leave the men's races aside just for fun. Oh, I like that. Yeah. It's like because historically, that's not the way it's worked. Exactly. Yeah, we have to uplift the women's. But I mean, it was a, there was a lot of men's competitors that did cool things out there. Oh, yeah. And a lot of like cool narratives to Dylan Bowman put himself out there and had a rough day and still powered to the finish. And it takes a lot of grit and guts. I think he had left a lot of his guts out there on the course and he did it. And I thought that was cool. So the woman that was pushing Courtney was Anne Lee's Rousset Segeret. I think that's how you pronounce it. Not French is not my skill set. And the French were dominating. Yeah. So many strong French performances out there. And I wonder if it's because the train is like a little bit more similar to something we see at UTMB. What do you think that is? Yeah, I mean, I think a little bit of that. I think also it's not a humongously deep elite field. And so you can get weird associations because you're not really getting a high enough sample size to see anything that's statistically significant. Look at that statistics, Mike Drop. Yeah. That was so well explained. I stopped paying attention after N equals blank in the second day of statistics. But I can touch that. I was looking at Anne Lee's training on Strava. It's very interesting training. It's very focused on running economy. It's not huge volume. I mean, her training volume was usually 60 to 70 miles per week. Kind of shows that if you're able to build your speed, if you're able to do vert, races like Hard Rock can be possible without doing 25 hour training weeks. Well, it's fun to look at her UTMB index score. I was doing this during the race. Yeah, wow, this is impressive. It was like 1-1-1-1-1-1-1. And then finally, a couple inspirational stories. Becky Bates was seventh at 61. Right. What? Yeah, it's just so inspiring. I mean, to me, it's so exciting. I have however many years to try to be like Becky. This is so cool. I can't wait. Do you think you want to do Hard Rock at 61? I don't think I ever want to do Hard Rock. I mean, that's maybe the final note on these trails is once you see them, you're like, how fuck is this possible? Like, how does this race even exist? It is the most gnarly hike you've ever done for 100 miles in remote backcountry in tough conditions. Well, it's exactly like the description I was reading, like, remains of trails. Yeah. I'm gonna have remains of Megan out there if I tried to do that. Yeah. I mean, I could imagine doing a 500 mile race more than I could imagine racing Hard Rock. That's how wild this experience is. Well, Hard Rock, I mean, we talked about team never hike. Yeah. Hard Rock is like, team always hike. Yes, it is. Like, you literally have to hike all the uphill. Yeah. And it points out just how difficult. And it's very similar to your T&B in that regard, but I think even harder than your T&B. Oh, for sure. The altitude is just so crushing. And like so many people talk about how that affects their metabolism. And they're digestive system and things like that. And it becomes incredibly relevant. Okay, do you want to get to some Tour de France stories? I was so excited. We get to talk about Pogaccia again. I've been on a total Pogaccia trend. It's been great. I actually typed Tate into the Google search. Yeah. And the next thing it said was, you know how it gives you, like, populates the next words for you. It said girlfriend and then wife. And I was like, is this because it's me? Yeah. Like, is it listening to our podcast? Are they together? They are together. Okay. It's okay. How do you feel about that? I had a little moment of let down. Yeah. And I was like, you know, things are good. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about Alex handle the emails before bed. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Again, hall pass for Tate Pogaccia. So he's currently still in second. But him and Jonas Vindigo, the two leaders are going head-to-head in such an epic fashion every single day. They're duking it out. Yeah. And it's elevating both of them in the process. And I think it's so cool. But I also like, there's a ton of like sportsmanship and jewelry between the two of them. So Tate, yesterday on Instagram, he posted this picture of him and Jonas riding side-by-side, which was pretty close to the finish line when they were, they were just like two boys out there sprinting for fun, trying to see if they could want off each other when, you know, they were going to get the same time most likely heading into the finish. And it was a picture of them and he was like heading into the rest day and straight to the coffee shop with Jonas. They were just chillin' side-by-side. But I feel like it's emblematic. Like they've taken this rivalry between the two of them and I feel like from at least my impression, they've made each other better in the process. Oh, definitely. They're doing things that are just kind of unprecedented in sports. And the reason that we are talking about this now is please, please tune in this week. This is week three. This is the final week of the tour coming up. Watch it daily if you can on like the YouTube recaps or live on Peacock. It is such an exciting thing. And I think we'll be talking about this year in the Tour de France for many years to come. It's going to be really cool. There's a lot you can learn from it too in our training theory. I think a lot of the recovery principles apply to this. What I was curious about with Todd is we talked about he got in a crash sometime in April, broke his wrist and he has spent, so Tuesday, we're recording on Monday. So this will be live is the time trial and he's been spending like five weeks in his time trial bike because if you think about it, it's the best way to bike with a broken wrist. And I'm so curious to see what happens. And I think it gets to the idea that sometimes injuries are a unique advantage to do something different. And I actually think to some extent his broken wrist has given him a leg up. It'll be really, yeah, a wrist up. Yes. It'll be very interesting in time trial. I bet he crushes shit. It hasn't. Is that your prediction? Yeah, my official prediction. You got to, you have some money to make after. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't bet on Courtney, exactly. What were you thinking? What was I thinking? Oh my God. But you know, they're also just perfect foils. Jonas is very conservative in terms of how he races. And Todd is just like out there and goes for it constantly. Can't wait to see what happens here. But the reason we love the tour really for the things like the podcast is not just because we're huge sports fans. It's because it is the cutting edge of science and performance because this is the place where every single half a percent matters in the past that's led to really dark places that we've talked about before with doping and things like that. We're going to leave that aside as always and think a little bit now about the fatigue resistance element. It's often called durability and the research if you want to search it. But we always talk about this tired 20 that Megan talked about. How can your legs perform after you've done a certain amount of kilojoules of work? So often in the research, it's like 2000 or 3000 kilojoules. So I was talking about a lot of work and some athletes and some training approaches seem to improve that number more. And then as a result, improve race performance more. So there's a ton of studies on this metric. And the wild thing that they find is that fresh power profiles. So how much power a person can put out when totally fresh is not what determines success. Especially as athletes level up from under 23 to pro. The reasons athletes level up to that next step is because for whatever reason, they can maintain a fresher power profile later on. And I think a lot of training theory is coalescing in the idea that we need to think about fatigue resistance. And we need to train to fatigue resistance and to think about how, like, what are the variables that we were putting in to help improve that tired 20? And I love so there was a just a study that came out in 2023 in the Eurojournal Sports Science. It was called the relationship between training characteristics and durability and professional cyclists across the competitive season. And they took 30 under 23 cyclists and they had them do these fresh and fatigued power profiles. And they did this for actually two, five and 12 minute power. And I think it's kind of interesting. They chose those numbers. But they were looking at like what variables and what training characteristics related to these power profiles. Yeah. And it's so cool in cycling because in running, we often, we don't have enough data to not do this in a lab. In cycling, you just take someone's power meter, analyze it in good data, and get fascinating information, and then cross correlate it with their training history, also from their power meters, and basically develop full unified theories for the training approaches that work. Which is why I think so many cyclists were hesitant to put their power numbers on Strava. Yeah. Also too because there's been seculations about like if a runner exceeds this amount of power or this amount of watts per kilogram, like what's considered clean versus dirty. So I think a lot of cyclists have been hesitant to put on there, but recently they have been. And I think it's been leading to this whole host of like new training ideas. Yeah. And also I think that type of rationale fell by the wayside because people can just calculate what someone's watts per kilogram is very easily and so on Twitter, there's these amazing accounts that do it after each stage and tell you where it stacks up historically. But the fascinating thing on this study is basically that it didn't find anything obvious. It was totally scattered. It was totally weird and totally uncertain. So here's two quotes, a significant relationship was found between training time below first ventilatory threshold. So this is zone one and zone two in a five zone model, easy training and improvements in absolute and relative two minute fatigue efforts. So in other words, easy training made athletes fatigued two minute efforts to short efforts better. Okay. That seems counterintuitive to me. I'm going to get to make sense because two minute efforts still has an outsize component of aerobic volume. I think that's counterintuitive is how it relates to the next point. Yes. And the next point is it also relates between a shift towards a polarized training intensity. So that's a more intense training intensity and improvements in absolute and relative 12 minute fatigue power. So the weird part here is that the two minute fatigue power responded to easy training. The 12 minute fatigue power, which is much like more lactate thresholdy responds to polarized harder training, which leads me to think we just don't know what's going on. Yeah. That would not be my hypothesis at all heading into the study and I why do you think this? So my theory is that as the season goes on athletes race more. And so racing makes their training intensity more polarized. Yep. So essentially just seeing that races make athletes better fatigue resistance. Yeah. And that's why we love athletes do races. If you're doing altres, like if you're doing a hundred mileer, try to do at least a 50k, maybe a 50 mileer in the build because there is something that happens in a race setting that is unique. And then I'm also thinking that for the shorter events, it's just fitness. Like we're just starting to see fitness at the two minutes. And so fitness responds to the training volume metrics and aerobic development. Well, do you really think a tour de France stage creates more polarized training? Because they're spending so much, I mean, I feel like they're hurried. Well, maybe I was thinking about climbs and stuff because it depends on the types of volume they're doing. I mean, these are you 23 cyclists. They're not quite doing tour de France stuff. That's true. Yeah. You're doing on more one day races. So we don't know cycling well enough honestly to speculate on the specifics. But the big conclusions for us, these numbers are not set in stone. They changed throughout the year. Be aware of how your own fatigue resistance responds. Race consistently, try to increase aerobic volume through a bunch of different metrics. And think about the nervous system. So anytime you're talking about fatigue resistance, you're thinking about the nervous system. Because it's not just fitness. Fitness is your fresh state. The nervous system starts to come into play after you've kind of exhausted yourself through all of these kilojoules of work. So nervous system for runners can be vert downhill running, can implicate the nervous system. Your emotional state, your recovery, your fueling, all these different elements. Like optimizing the nervous system can optimize your fatigue performance. Well, I love how you talked about the idea of racing consistently. And I think I'm seeing that more and more for athletes is the importance of racing consistently. And my reflection after racing this weekend is for me, a lot of that comes in the downhills. So I think in training, I'm pretty good at every once in a while doing more tempos on uphills. But for me, I think I don't necessarily take risks on downhills in training that I do in racing. And for me, that feel of the downhills racing is unparalleled, especially when the woman caught up to me this weekend. Oh, I should probably run this downhill a little faster. Yeah. But for me, the technical downhills are where the racing advantage comes in. It's Alan Iverson out here. We talk about practice. Practice, not a game, Megan. Not a game practice. And that's how I feel on downhills in training. It's like, I'm just less willing to invest any sort of risk in it. And I think that's fine. I'm able to adapt to it as long as I'm doing plenty of dirt. But in racing, barely crosses my mind. Oh, I don't even think about it. Hence. I don't even think about ankles. Yeah. Which I spend a lot of my long runs being like, one is my ankle going to pop. And I don't think about that all in racing. Yeah. But I do think that parallels the tour because we're seeing in the tour, Tibopino, Pierla tour, Pierla tour, by the way, best name when riding in late tour. But a lot of them, those athletes have had troubles descending. And much like a draw runner, they've had to think about ways in which to improve their descending. And I find that curious because it's like, I mean, I think a lot of that comes through racing, but they've also tried other modalities too. Yeah. And what I love is the juxtaposition of these two athletes. So Tibopino, one of the best French cyclists ever. He's been around a long time too. But back in 2012, he got the Yips with going downhill. So they just got the mental block with it. And now in the tour, Pierla tour, his great name, but he's been struggling with his downhills and has lost a lot of time on some of the key downhills. And he's still in that moment. But Pino actually got over his Yips and he didn't do it on the bike. He did race car driver training. So he did F1 training to essentially make him comfortable with these speeds and these turns and things. And it points out that like everything you do can incorporate into your athletic development. It doesn't have to just be training that makes you better at the thing you're doing. Well, the theory, so he consulted a bunch of experts in terms of how to improve his downhill. And their theory was that he actually just wasn't comfortable with the raw speed. Yeah. So they felt like if they put him in the F1 car, that he would get much more comfortable with being at that high speed. And it did work. I mean, he actually though he did struggle with descending at other parts during the tour later in his career, but he didn't necessarily like have the Yips. But I think for runners so often like ski bike, do these other things where you're descending and having a few lines at much faster clips and I think that I think that really does help with descending. Yeah. And I probably a place that also comes up there is eyesight matters. Yes. Yeah. Actually, the number of athletes that struggle with like technical running and like you should just get your eyes checked. Yeah. And they come back and they need contacts or glasses and it helps a ton. Or get less. Yeah. I mean, maybe the best thing you can do for your technical running is if you have poor eyesight to get it fixed, like we've seen that in athletes, not not to say it's universal fix. But think about those types of things. Basically, anything that you think might be a weakness for you doesn't have to be usually it usually can become a strength or at least something that you manage. But you do have to be kind of strategic about it. Also, I say it also too isn't just vision. It's also depth perception as well. So there's so many different components actually that I as a very, very complicated system. Yeah. And so think about that. Like get it checked out. Talk to an expert. You know the eye. So this is actually a good transition into our three things discussion. Yeah. The eye is the place that I was always most fascinated by as a kid. And I was reading about evolution. Really? Yes. Cool. We've never talked about this before. So it was always the example I had heard of convergent evolution where the eye developed independently in multiple different pathways and evolution, and it's just wild to think about how these long-term processes over millions of years can essentially create structures that are truly bonkers. Like if you look at an eye, you're like, what the fuck is that? I do not feel comfortable around that thing. That was how I felt in medicine. Yeah. It was the one thing in medicine that truly weirded me out. Yeah. Like the guts coming out of an abdomen or something, but as soon as we started playing around like the microscopic eye, I was like, oh, I don't know about this. Yeah. And so to me, it's so cool, which brings us to last week we talked about evolution via the minimal cell. And after we posted that on Patreon, we got a message from one of the authors of the study who is a podcast listener. I don't know if we should use names. Is it okay to use names? I think it's okay. He's on the study. Okay. Yeah. His name is Donald Schoolmaster. He's the coolest guy we've messaged about running. I think he did a lot of the stats work on this breakthrough paper in nature. So it's really brilliant. Yeah. Also congrats because getting a paper in nature is, I mean, that's like the equivalent of like running hard rock in the ultra world. It's huge. Yeah. You don't have to be fun. What? If in future episodes, near the end of the episode, kind of like we do hot takes, we do like a celebration thing of some listener doing something epic outside of athletics. Oh, I love that. Wouldn't that be cool? That'd be cool. He's also given us a chance to talk about random shit. Well, we should do that like as a continuation to listener corner. I like it. Yes. Okay. Perfect. If you have that you're willing to share, we'll make them anonymous if you want and talk about them. And similarly, this is kind of a listener accomplishment that's also helping us out on this topic. This is an email that we got, AG1 exclamation point. I started taking it on your recommendation and it has changed my workouts in recovery. Even at 52, I absolutely felt the difference after I started taking it daily, perhaps because I'm 52. AG1 is the magical sweet sauce. It's so good. You know, I spilled it this week. This week I spilled AG1 twice. Yeah. All over our counter and it got on to like all of our various electronic appliances. Including on our mic cord. Yeah, but you know, it didn't fry any of them. No. It's magic stuff. It just made it even better. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That you're hearing comes from AG1. No, but this, you know, does point out, like not for everybody, right? We want to always say that, you know, you don't have to love athletic reans, but we truly do. And when, you know, Megan's coming back and performing so well at altitude, you know, this could be something that makes a difference. We have seen this type of intervention, which is just generally a multivitamin with micro nutrients, really help performance in a number of professional athletes at altitude while aging, all of these different things. We don't know the mechanisms, but athletic reans is awesome. So drink AG1 dot com slash swap SWAP order there, bonus travel packs, vitamin D, both things you need. And you also support the podcast because, you know, they've been a great sponsor for us and only sponsor for many years now. Yeah. Well, I clearly have like 52 disclaimers for everything. Yeah. I am so baffled by how athletic reans works and it works. It's the good stuff. I get every once in a while, I miss a day of athletic reans and I get so sad. I get so sad. That's happening to my cells inside that drink. So drink AG1 dot com slash swap. Okay. This is a sponsorship that is not paid for or not at this is just a fun thing from a listener. This is called nip strips. And I'm going to read this email. Hey, I love listening to your podcast. Thank you for sharing yourselves and spreading joy and knowledge so generously. I'm writing because I was shocked to hear David say on an episode recently that he's using band aids for nipple chafing nip strips is my husband's company. And if you haven't tried them, you need to. If you let me know and address the sentence, you said I will get some of your way. So I ordered nip strips separately because I'm like, we just need this. This is the best idea. So out there, if you ever have issues with nipple chafing, support a podcast listener and buy some nip strips. Did you have nipple chafing this weekend? No, I didn't. Why not? It's short enough. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not really a chafing guy. Except like over a longer distances. Yeah. But I'm going to be start using nip strips because they're podcast listener all the time. Clearly better than duct tape too. Yeah. So this is unspoken. You've tried duct tape in your nipple. D duct tape in your nipples? Yeah. I mean, that could work. Much like the scene in 40-year-old virgin. Oh, yeah. But except your entire skin would go off. Just give yourself a little wax job. A little wax job. So thank you for listening. And if you ever actually have a company that makes something cool, even though it's not sponsored, just let us know because we want to try to bring cool products to people and help businesses and things like that too. Though I was thinking, being the CEO of nip strips. Oh, that's so cool. It's so cool. But also it would be a funny thing to talk about at Family Reunion. Oh, that would be such a good thing. Can I have a dinner table conversation? Yeah. If you're the CEO of nip strips, you got to own it. Yeah. Well, you're like, what do you do? I get a party. I'd be like, what do you do? You know what? You should tattoo nip strips on your chest. I protect the nipples of the world. Okay. Final little interesting thing. You might have seen this piece of news that Strava was used for international murder. Yeah. And that's very strange and interesting. And I have mixed feelings about it. But I want to talk about it because it really jumped out and made me think a lot of weird thoughts. Well, it was also, I felt like it was this type of stuff. The type of content that belonged on a murder podcast because there was so many twists and elements to the story. Yeah. Maybe I should actually, like, and now I'd have to do too much research. I was thinking it would be a really interesting, like, news articles article. You know what? You should have a second podcast. It's just a murder podcast. A murder podcast? Yeah. Strava probably wouldn't like it. What happened here is that a Russian commander was murdered on their Strava route by Ukrainian spies or whatever. And they were found via Strava. So, you know, brings up a lot of thoughts about privacy and things like that also brings up why was a Russian commander loading their Strava? I totally get it. Yeah. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it. The last, like, 10 days or so I would be a good guy. Which we should go to is profile? I wonder if it's still up. Yeah. Well, while thing though is that they were going through, like, the kudos, they were trying to understand more about, like, the Strava profile of this guy and the Russian guy, the Ukrainian guy that murdered him was one of the only people to like a Strava profile. So it truly came back full circle. Yeah. So here's a quote from an article we were reading that is yet to be established on, like, direct causation, but there isn't even more surreal twists to the story. one of the only four accounts on Monday evening that had liked the post about the commander's last run, shares the name of major general, Gerulo Boonenov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence. It's just pretty boss. It's like, it's like, kind of when you go like, smoke someone in a race and you go back and like, they're shouting at you. It'll, or it could be, you know, someone that created a fake profile. This is a joke. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. There's a lot of different theories here. Yeah. But I really hoped, I couldn't read. So it was all like Russian and Ukrainian, the writing. So I couldn't actually understand the gist of a Strava profile, but I really hoped it was beyond the lens of morning run. Oh, yeah. I hope if you're getting murdered over your Strava profile, you actually have good titles. Yeah, I wonder if it auto uploaded after the murder. I'm not sure exactly how it happened. No, I don't think, oh, good question. Yeah, that would be pretty sad. That would be epic. Yeah, so this story, I mean, it is, you know, we're making light of it because like, I think you can argue that Russia is like, committing international war crimes. But all death is sad even. Oh, it's tragic. So that part's sad. But also just kind of a weird moments in worlds colliding and thinking about like how we're also connected. Like to me, what really brought up is that, you know, Russians right now that are contributing to this war effort that is so like, you know, unethical and bad and evil in some ways are using Strava again. They're just people just like us. They're people who want segments. Yeah, exactly. Like, isn't that the metaphor for life? Yeah. At the end of the day, we all just want segments. Yeah. And poster on ice cream and burritos with Courtney. Yeah. Like, I bet this guy, I bet it was Delightful. Yeah. Do you think he was a band of Courtney? Do you think Courtney has transcended Russia and Ukraine? Yeah, Courtney can create world peace. That's my, that's my final thing. But no, just one of those constant reminders of compassion and we're more similar than we are different. And not, and, you know, that really applies to people you know or people in your communities, but it also applies to people that feel so different and when there's total different, like total changes and, you know, the way you think about someone based on like, you know, something like this. And so, yeah, it makes me almost want to cry but at the same time. I was beautifully said. I was pretty badly said. No, no, it was beautifully said. I just feel weird emotions about it because like, at a certain part of me is like fascinated and thinks it's almost funny. But then part of me hates that part of myself because I just think it's like heartbreaking and tragic. Oh, it is, yeah, yeah, no. Running just like I am. And once the same things, I want probably- I just want a post-run burrito. Yeah, yeah. So, even though that person probably was not making good decisions in life, I wish them a post-life burrito somewhere out there in the great beyond. Oh, that sounds, that sounds a nice thing to wish. Okay, great. Do you want to go to hot takes? That's good hot takes. On that note. Okay. Cool down walks are greater than running laps in the parking lot over estimating your long run and getting a quarter mile to half mile walk at the end equals pure bliss. I love this point. So actually on Wednesday before the race, we tempoed up Asa mountain and I got to the top and I was like, I literally cannot run another step right now. I sat down in a log and you were like, get up Megan, you need to clear lactate and you took me on a very long cool down. And to be honest with you, I did not love your ass at that moment. But I do think actually, so I agree with this, I totally understand the like- Yeah. The physical pool of this. But I also do think there's a lot of merit in warming down and clearing lactate, especially if it's been a harder effort. Yeah, and you know, that was very interesting how angry you were at me on that. That was kind of angry. But then you got happy. Oh, I was cracked. But I think that's the point. Yes, so you were cracked and then the cool down helped you clear lactate, helped your heart rate stabilize and then you felt good. Yeah, so a good example is when I've done Zwift racing on the bike, I get this really cool heart rate data. And so whenever I push lactate threshold, once I start my cool down, my power output and my heart rate are just decoupled. Yep. So my power output is low, my heart rate is quite high. Over the course of about 15 minutes, it stabilizes and then it settles in. And so that settling in moment is what you're looking for in a cool down. So you can go very slow, but let your body clear it. And you see that in the Tour de France all the time. So behind the podium, Tade and Jonas were cooling down together. Their bikes were literally like five feet apart and they were getting in calories, cooling down. And they do this every day, after the tour, I'm curious to know how long do you think they're cooling down for after these long tour stages? I think it's relatively short. I think it's just like 10 minutes or 10 or 15 minutes, but it doesn't need to be much. It can be incredibly low intensity. They probably, if you can run, it probably should be. And this points out one other thing. I have seen the athletes that under shoot their long runs just a little bit, often have worse race performances amongst the athletes I coach. So let's say there's an 18 mileer and they do 17.7, slightly worse outcomes. I don't know if there's a connection there, it's probably confounding variables. But I do encourage you, if you're healthy, to do those parking lot lots, lots, lots, lots. Lots of Ls there, too many Ls for my brain right now. But I think that it might just partially be that at the end of an 18 mileer or a 12 mileer or a 10 mileer or whatever, those final 0.3 can feel insurmountable and letting yourself know that they're not is kind of key because it feels like nothing after the fact or before the fact. But sometimes in the moment, to me, it feels like everything to be able to add that on. So as long as you're healthy, I'd say always do those laps. I'm gonna add a corollary hot take. Just don't cold down after ultra's. Yeah, that's true. Look that, go eat sausages. Or races, I mean, we don't cold down after races. We didn't cold down after the 25. No, no, no. Well, I couldn't have moved, but even if my hands were okay. I still went straight to my sausages. That's exactly what I mean. Okay, number two, PDLite Freeze Pops are the best post-run treat after a summer run in East Coast humidity. Ooh, I've never had a PDLite Freeze Pops in my life. Yeah, but I do like Freeze Pops. I think just stick with regular Freeze Pops. You might as well make it like electrolyte. I mean, it's based, I don't know. Yeah, PDLite though, is that a thing? Yeah, I imagine you can make it taste good. I guess PDLite's just like hydrating for babies, so it could be hydrating for adults. Oh, PDLite's great hydration. Okay. Yeah, I know so many athletes that drink it before the race. Yeah. I'm actually shocked. You haven't drank PDLite before a race. The things you do in the name of science, David. Maybe I can do that instead of beans. Maybe that would be the cheer. But always reminder, the humidity on the East Coast right now is hell. Oh, yes, yeah. And if you're out there, like we're talking a lot about altitude, I think humidity, I would rather be running at 14,000 feet than in, you know, 80 dew point. Agreed, hot take right there. Yes. Yeah, I mean, some of my worst runs ever were when I was working in New Orleans, you know, for trips. Like it's so difficult. So if you're out there dealing with that, no, you're building your fitness beneath the surface, keep stacking those bricks. And then on the days where it clears up, you can move around your training schedule to use those days for maximal performance gains. That's great. Let's do one more hot take. I love this. Hydration flasks and bladder is good for performance in all caps. Yeah, we totally, we hear you on this. This is a situation around here. Grinit, so we've been, we have like a bottle sanitizer now for Leo. And I just need to run all our flasks through a bottle sanitizer. Yeah. I feel like if you, if you're an athlete and you have a lot of bottles, just get a baby bottle sanitizer. They're pretty cheap, right? Yeah, they're like 40 bucks. Yeah. And I'm sure you're getting even less. And it's so much easier to clean with them. Yes. I like what this listener's saying because isn't like penicillin a mold that appeared in the lab? I believe it was. So essentially penicillin is a mistake that they just left something out and the bacteria stopped growing essentially and they're like, fuck, this is us. And those types of mistakes have happened before. So perhaps you're actually creating the next great cure. You might be creating like the ultimate legal performance enhancer in your moldy bottle. Well, true. This listener in like 5,000 of our other listeners because I do feel like this is a ubiquitous experience. That's true. And we've also been there too. Yeah. My body's probably half mold this point. I think I'm pretty resistant. I think you're impervious to mold. I feel like you, I love that. You think I'm just impervious to everything. You are. I don't know. I believe. I believe. I believe so hard to do. Okay. So now we got the best listener corner ever. And so pay attention to this one. Hi, Megan and David. I know you two usually record on Monday. So I'm scrambling to scribble out this listener corner. Note slash request tonight. I'm writing from the hospital beside my 28 year old tuba playing endurance running husband, Mitch, as he's currently hooked up to oxygen in a couple of IVs. A week ago, we shared the most traumatic night of our lives as his right right lung waited out. So surrounded by infected fluid that he needed to be put on a ventilator until surgeons could insert a chest tube the following afternoon. He overheard doctors say that he would not survive the night without it. How this happened to such a suddenly, to such a fit young guy is beyond us. But how he's making it through is due in part to you two. The first moment morning intubated, he discovered that he was able to write us notes blindly onto a notebook. As I held his hand and reminded him that he is safe, he is strong, and this is all temporary. He pointed to the pen, I held up the notebook and watched, then wept as he copied out something that he had heard from Swap. And I'm going to leave that quiet between us. And there are so much more to our story that I could share. But for now, I just want to say thank you both for what you put out to the world and cultivate through the running community. Mitch is still recovering. And doctors are still trying to figure out exactly what is going on in his body and how best to move forward. He continues to remain impressively calm and optimistic, but hospital stays are still scary and weird. If you could give him a little shout out on the podcast, proud to call, perhaps a co-op, for some good healing vibes, that would be incredible. Love you both. Oh my God, Mitch. Mitch! Mitch, I am like crying right now. This is so beautiful. Mitch is the best. And I believe it's so hard to Mitch. Yeah, no, Mitch is doing so much better. Yeah. So, you know, the post script here is that, as you can tell, I mean, Mitch is approaching this with as much light as you possibly can in an incredibly traumatic and difficult time. And there's probably a lot of tough times to come, but Mitch is a beast. Such a beast. Yeah, putting one foot in front of you other when you're presented with something that fucking sucks. This is team never hike right here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Team never light. Like, you know, like they say at the, there's like the white light that you see, and you're like, come to the light and you're like, no, I'm just like, okay, Mitch, avoid the light right now. Yeah, such a boss. My God, my heart goes out to Mitch and his family. And I mean, I just can't even imagine. And it sounds like he's handling it with so much love. Yeah, and, you know, you were in the hospital with your heart and we had a similar moment where it's like, why did this happen and will you survive and all of these other questions? And, you know, I always think back to how you handled that, where, you know, it was hard and we knew that there'd be years of difficulty, but now it's fast-forward and we're 20 months later or something. And, you know, you're here having just raced. And... Well, it's a little different. But still, yes. So, my point being, Megan, you were told that you might never do this again. Probably, but never be able to perform like this again. And I think it points out for Mitch, our motivational message to you is like, keep putting that one foot in front of the other. Keep believing, yeah. And who knows what's possible? And no matter what, whether, you know, it's obviously not a choice how things turn out, but like, we love you so much. So much. So fucking much. Yeah, can we like do something for Mitch? Do something for Mitch. Like, what do you propose? I like a GoFundMe or something. Like, I want to help Mitch. Yeah, maybe. I mean, our podcast is, our podcast crew is such a, like, there's so much love that exists that I feel like, yeah. GoFundMe, go burrito me, maybe. Oh, go burrito me. That should be our spin off of GoFundMe. Okay, so Mitch, we're out there with love for you. And everyone out there, you're probably going through something right now and just know, like, we fucking love you. We're going through our own shit too. Hopefully, some of it comes out on the podcast. And we're right alongside you in that wild life journey. Sending you and wishing you so many literal and figurative burritos. And emails from Alex Honald. Oh, yes, they are ultimate foreplay. Just save them for 11 p.m. at night. I'm so excited. I love you. Huzzah! Crushed it. That was great. You did so well.