172. Jim Walmsley Interview! Training at the Edge and Betting on Yourself

Woohoo, welcome to the Summer Call Play podcast. We are so happy to be with you today. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And I'm feeling ready to all-caps train over here on this Tuesday. You're ready to train? I'm feeling ready to train big, actually. We just talked to Jim Wonsley. And I'm feeling ready to do anything in all-caps big, actually. Sleep, eat, poop, dream, work hard train. That man is inspiring. Yeah, this is a really cool interview. I think we learned a lot about how he goes all in for these events. Jim just set the course record at UTMB. In addition to his amazing course records, everywhere else. And one of the things he talked about a little bit that I was fascinated by is how, when he's training, it's kind of what he has to focus on because it requires so much of him physically and mentally. And I'm like, oh, that makes sense. You know, to be the best in the world at something, you do have to go all in. And Jim really laid that out. It was exciting. I mean, I'm not going to lie. Seeing Jim post Strava files over from France. I'm like, it looks so idyllic. It looks amazing. I would love to live in France. And then talking to Jim, it was, we kind of recognize that I was a little bit more of a Spartan lifestyle. And it wasn't like baguettes in wine and like everything that you think about France. Like it was hardcore training and dedication. And he's worked so hard for his UTMB victory. It was really both inspiring and daunting to me at the same time to see everything that he's done to make this happen. Well, you just said you're ready to all caps train. Oh, yeah, I feel so inspired. The inspiration is coming hot and heavy. And I know I feel that way too because I think one of the things Jim shows is the power of true vulnerability. When he decided to move to France a few years ago to focus on UTMB, yes, he had conquered a lot of US racing and international racing at that point. But doing that, you're putting your goals just out there. You cannot deny, as Jim talked about, that if you're doing that, you're going there to win. You're probably going there to set a course record. What happens if yet again, he doesn't have that perfect day? What happens is that people are all over the internet talking shit and Jim knows that and his partner Jess and they face that and they come out swinging. And for me, that's like whether it's running or work or coaching or writing or whatever, I'm like, fuck, that's what you need to do is to have that mindset of like being willing to fail to have like access to the ultimate types of successes. What's cool to me is he has that mindset and right alongside that mindset, he has his brain for thinking about training. I think this is a consistent theme that we've seen now. We've interviewed officially all the ghosts. We pulled it off with Jim, which is really exciting. How does it that we actually got Jim? I know, actually big thanks to Sasha and Drew. I think they did it. They were a little bit of our wing men, our wing people on our behalf and thank you for helping real Jim in for us. But no, I mean, I feel like all the other ghosts, Jim really thinks about like training philosophy and training theory. And to me, there's like a chicken or the egg amongst the goats. Like, are they goats because they're thinking about the training theory so deeply? Or are they thinking about the training so deeply so theory because they're goats? I think it's a little bit of both, but Jim really has a knack for understanding training theory and I think that came out too in this interview. Yeah, he even gave us numbers. It was so cool. We can't wait for you to hear this one because it's a little different than some of our other interviews. I would say a lot of times in interviews, we start to just like joke around from the outset. And with Jim, we really wanted to dig down and get to know him a little better because I think unlike Claire, Courtney or whatever, like this really is us getting to know Jim. We've only gotten to meet him in person once before. And when that happened, it was like, you know, so long ago and so before the Jim, we haven't come to know and love through the media. And so getting him to see in this context was just so, so cool. It was also a very unique interview for us because we both had COVID. We both actually still have COVID. We're both over here coughing. And I had a coughing fit during the interview. So wait for it around 50 minutes in. I left for about like three minutes and then chugged a quarter bottle of robotus and it was delicious and I came back. And I had these burning questions to ask, but I could barely breathe without coughing. And so I was like, Jim, tell me about ketones. So wait for some of you can kind of hear it probably in our voices a little bit throughout the interview, but we held strong. We did it on proud of us, buddy, but definitely hard to record when you have COVID. You went into the other room and definitely like down some purple drink. Oh, it was the good purple drink. But then I came back and you were a little pissed. You were like, leave. You didn't want my coughing in the room anymore. And I was like, damn, man, he's, he's choosing Jim over me, but you know what, I totally get it. Well, I mean, you stepped up. You did so well. And now I'm the one who can't talk as my lungs are just repelling. So what I need to do, I need to get my lungs, all these little airsacks to channel the power of Jim Wamsley. Oh, yes, all caps believe in your airsacks. Yes. My airsacks are so ready. I theoretically have the Grindstone 100K this week. I'm going to go shoot my shot. My body's feeling okay, even if my lungs are a little bit raw right now. And while I'm out there, I'm just going to think, you know what, Jim got super vulnerable and he took these shots. Why can't I? Why shouldn't I? Because like the worst that happens in this case, as long as my health is okay, is that I just fail. And who gives a fuck about failure? That's what I learned from Jim. It's like, that is just part of the process. He's done it before. I mean, at Western States, he was on course record pace his very first year there. He takes a wrong turn right at the end of the race and barely finishes, you know? And then he comes back the next year and does set a course record and then falls it up with another course record. And he's got course records everywhere. We're looking at Lake Sonoma, Bandera, Tarawera. This man has gone and destroyed course records across the board in so many places. Yeah, I mean, his status in this sport is unmatched. He went ultra under the year four years in a row, at least. He's going to win again. Do you think it's going to be this year, over a shirt? After you can be. You're pretty much a lock at that point. That performance alone, maybe Drew has a shot if Drew doesn't have the race perhaps. But either way, Jim is just an incredible athlete, an incredible person. And I can't wait for everyone to hear this. I think you get a little bit of a new window into Jim, mixed with our personalities a little bit. And it was just so special to have him on. Was there a single piece of advice that you're taking? It was kind of cool to do this interview because as I said, I'm feeling that all caps desire to train and believe. Is there a single piece of advice that you're taking from this interview into grindstone 100k coming up? Well, it's a good time to talk to a goat. Which Jim said is one of the big changes that happened to him as he progressed through his career is understanding that when it gets hard for him, it's hard for everyone. It's to not push back against that feeling. Like the non-resistance to those feelings is what I'm going to try to channel, like unless it comes from my airsacks and it's just like my body. I feel like hearing Jim say that. And seeing him put it into practice at UTMB, so UTMB, where he just set the record, was not a linear process to absolutely crushing it from the outset. He went through a period where he fell back and the whole narrative shifted in his head. It's like, oh, the same things are starting to happen as before. And on the fly, he recontextualized it, came out and gave himself the shot and then goes and runs one of the best races ever. And you know, similarly, I want to have that like non-resistance to the feelings of difficulty or even the intrusive thoughts about like, oh, maybe this just isn't the day. Because if you can just weather those storms, who knows what's possible? Well, that's what I love about these types of distances, like 100K distance, 100 mile distance. It's so different than like a 5K, a 10K, even a 50K because it's like, you have a long time to think about and to build momentum and to like turn things around to face that feeling of non-resistance. And I think that's, it's so cool that you're wandering into this coming ahead. Is there anything you're taking away from Jim for your future endeavors? I'm excited to train. Oh, good enough to that. Like, I think six or seven years ago, I looked at Jim O'olmsey's training and I think like, honestly, the first thing that went through my head is, is this guy going to sustain it in sport? Like, I didn't think it was sustainable over the longterm. And I think for us, we always play a cautious and delicate balance with training, thinking about longterm growth and longterm priority. But we've seen with athletes that you also can push those limits a little bit. And I think for me, I want to do a little bit of a try also miles in my training, carefully and cautiously. And I think Jim, for me, is really inspiring on that front. Yeah, like a Jim O'olmsey light situation. Oh, very, very, very light. But it's fast. Yes, all caps light. He had injuries earlier this year. And the way he thought about his training, you're here, he was like, okay, I need five big weeks. That's all he said he needed in the context of his training. Actually, I think in some sense, we didn't get into this, is I do actually think, I wonder if that injury was helpful in some sense, because maybe if he didn't have that injury, he'd be like, I need 10 big weeks. And maybe five big weeks is for him, especially given the volume of training that he does, what it takes without overcooking it. Maybe, but the problem with all this is sometimes, it's just a, you know, ex-post facto, like justification of what already happened. Yeah, we don't have the counterfactual. We don't know on UTMV any of those years. And the days just played out differently. This year, he did win. And it's further cemented his goat status, but he was already the goat. And I think sometimes we, like, just justify based on results that, oh, that everything came before it was the right thing. Yeah, exactly. It's convenient to make narratives based off of results. Definitely. And, you know, the final message is to pay attention to what Jim says at the very end of this episode about believing in what it means to truly bet on yourself. Because aside from all the running stuff, which I think Jim, even acknowledges, would be, is kind of dust in the wind long term. The process of that vulnerability and telling everyone else to bet on themselves is so cool. So I can't wait for people to hear this. I think you're gonna get a new side of Jim and it was just such an honor to have him on. And stick around to the very end. When we tell him that at least once a month in our household, we say boom, boom, with a zoom, zoom. When things go well, the honor of Jim, and I'm not gonna lie, I down with that robotus in, and I was like, boom, boom, with a zoom, zoom, Megan, you gotta get back in the game. I love it so much. I was believing. You know what else would help you get back in the game? But athletic greens. Oh, yes. Are you gonna take some in the middle of grindstone? Not in the middle, no, no. Maybe if you're struggling. This drill. You should just throw some at your air sacs and see what happens. Just inhale it. Just be snorting this shit. Exactly. It's like a bathroom in the 1980s. Yes, perhaps. We truly believe in this stuff. It works so well for adaptation and recovery. Basically across the board, our pro athletes are taking it. Drinkag1.com slash swap SWAP SWAP. We should have asked Jim if he uses it. For some reason, I doubt it. I actually really wanted to ask him a lot more details about his supplement use. I did have that one moment where when I could barely breathe because I was coughing, I was like, do you take ketones, Jim? And he's experimented a little but it doesn't seem game-changing for him. Yeah, if he doesn't take ketones, I doubt he's doing. But maybe he does. Maybe the mystery of that will get you to drinkag1.com slash swap. And finally, we love John G for their amazing clothes at JohnG.com. Use offer code SWAP SWAP to get 15% off. They make the best gear. You might look just as fly as Jim Womzley running over top of those mountains. Usually I would say false. That's impossible. But I do believe in John G gear. Actually, they have some good new stuff coming out. And I have them saved on my browser. And I checked their website in embarrassing amount of times. They're probably like, why has our traffic increased 450% from Colorado? Yeah, that's exactly what happens with me in the Google search of Jim Womzley short shorts. I believe it. The way that you told me leave when I came back into the group, you look at those short shorts a lot. Well, I was like, okay, this is my one on one time with Jim Womzley. I don't want that cough to get in the way. Now I can barely breathe over here. But we had so much fun with this. And most of all, thank you all for your support. If you can, give the podcast five stars wherever you listen and click follow, it really helps. And your support over all of these years has helped the podcast rocket to the top of the charts. And we just love you all so much. We were so excited to share with our Patreon that we were interviewing Jim Womzley. And it's the best. It's like going to family and saying something that's coming ahead. And I feel like everyone was equally excited as we are, which sets a lot. Yeah. So patreon.com slash swap, SWAP, where you can get all of our stuff, the community, all that's, and without further ado, we have the one and only. Jim Womzley. Boom, boom, with a June, June. Jim Womzley, it's such an honor to have you on less than two weeks after you won UTMB in a course record time. How are you feeling? Yeah, it's been an exciting time and kind of a real big high from a win like UTMB. So yeah, kind of trying to balance out and see what's next. You look incredible, actually, amazing. David and I, we had a stomach virus in COVID combo, post UTMB. And you look a lot more spry and more covered than we did and we didn't even do shit. So it's pretty impressive. But how are you feeling about it all? I mean, I feel like this is history and the making. It's been something that you've been thinking about for so long. Did it, like, equate with what you were expecting it to be more or less, like, how does it all feel processing it? I think there's more of a breakthrough feeling than I expected. Definitely a bigger kind of sigh of relief. And yeah, kind of acknowledging that maybe there was a bit more pressure than I would admit and that it finally feels like a bit of a breakthrough. I love that idea of pressure because we've talked a lot on the podcast about how we think you're one of the best athletes in human history. And that obviously opens up to a lot of awareness from, you know, millions of people know your name and are following your journey. When you say pressure, is that mostly from internal sources or almost from the outside? Be where you know that you're doing this on a big stage in a way that equates more with things that, like, NBA players see or soccer champions see than runners usually see. I think most of the time it comes from internal pressure because we've chosen a spot that's pretty remote from a lot of people. So for the most part, it's kind of locked up on my own in this match. When running UTMB this year, there was even a moment in the beginning of the course where I'll be with a pack of other runners, a pack of other Americans, with French runners, with anyone. And pretty much on the side of the road, you just hear Alay, Jim, Alay, Jim, and come on, Jim. This is your year. And I think one of the American guys who just had a chuckle and was like, no pressure, right? And I was like, yeah, pretty much. But so at different times it's coming from different places. But when I'm away, I think it's mostly internal pressure but also easier to block it out and deflect it. I think is the main thing that you try to do and just say, it's not a big deal. It's normal process. Everybody's trying to win UTMB, of course. So it's not a big deal. Well, you're Alay, Jim, accent there, with grade A. And I'm like, if for no other reason to move to France then to crush the accent like that, that's where we want to be. Did you speak French when you moved to France or is that something that you learned while you're over there? I took French in high school college. So I would say grammatically I kind of understood it but as far as communicating, like listening and speaking, pretty much zero. And then Jess came from about zero background in French and we both progressed a lot on our French and kind of how we can speak and probably another sign that pressure is relieved since UTMB is I haven't been practicing much French in this block because I feel like I just haven't had the energy to study in addition to training. And I haven't increased my studying again yet. I hope to soon, but at least having conversations with people in French like more sentences are coming out than ever before. And I think that's a passive sign that actually there's some some stress that's maybe been finally relieved a little. That's so exciting. I'd like cross the finish line and be like, we're in English bitches. Our French is abysmal actually. I feel like we pronounce Laise Hoaches. So I feel like our French is so, so bad. Yeah, I mean, so I think thinking back to your UTMB journey, we're such an honor to have you on because we're huge fans of sports and as I was talking about MBA and soccer players, your journey here has been, I think, transcendent and something that will go down in sports history all the way back to when you moved to France. So for our listeners, when did you move to France? And why did you do that? Yeah, we moved to France with my wife Jess. Luckily, she kind of accepted the idea and proposal and which actually was combined with a real proposal and everything because we weren't just looking to come for three months in vacation visa that you get within American passport, but it's literally going through immigration process and most of it kind of on our own to do that processing. But eventually, we had to get some help and Hoka ended up finding an agency to help us because we just, our paperwork was stuck for whatever reason and it ended up taking us 13 months to actually get our visa. But now we have like a talent visa, it's good for four years. So May 2022 is when we arrived in France, our visa paperwork started in about February that year. And then race first UTMB 2022 since being here. But I remember thinking it would have been easier to come here as a training block in just a three-month stint and not do everything beforehand and just focus on the race. I think actually another American David Hedge was living in Borg Samarice, which is not too far away. Basically doing that and I was like, actually that's probably an easier call to just do it that on a short-term scale better. But more or less knowing that there could be stress with actually trying to immigrate to another country legally and the first try could actually add more stress than it does de-stress trying to live here and accomplish that goal. And so initially knowing that it would at least be a year and a half project in France trying to focus on UTMB. And then so we've been here almost a year and a half now. And how far are you from Chamonix? It seems like it's a little bit outside of Chamonix, but did you go into Chamonix much race week? It's such a chaos zone that I can't imagine what it's like to be Jim Wandsley walking down the streets of Chamonix pre-UTMB and how overwhelming that is. It's funny, after the awards, I had to book it straight down the Main Street with the award first place and the big thing of flowers and just in my hoca sunset for everything. And I'm like, I gotta get to meet these other people on the other side of Chamonix and I just like kept my head down, look straight and just booked it through tons and tons of people. And it was kind of funny because you can just see like people are getting so caught off guard that you're just walking almost so directly down the street and just like they can't believe it. Because Chamonix one week before, one week after UTMB is a special time in our sport and that so many ultra runners to send on the city and are all in that place. And many participants are huge fans and it's just a very all-in sport. So everybody feels like you know everyone and yeah, it can be a bit overwhelming to be around Chamonix. So I typically try to get in on kind of like Tuesday for Saturday race or I guess Friday start. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of like the Pope Mobile like when the Pope comes to town, that's you going down with the award and the streets just part and everyone wants to put their hand on Jim. They're like, don't take a Strava segment, he's going for a segment right now, yeah. We've finally implemented riding the bike in and out of town this year, which was interesting. I think it helps as well as far as trying to know parking because parking in Chamonix during that week is also terrible. So let's zoom back just slightly. So in the United States, you know, you conquered Western states and we'll talk about that a little bit later maybe, but then you set your sights on UTMB and there's this learning process and where you know, you go there for a number of years, you have some incredible races but they don't meet the potential that you have, which we saw this year of winning and course record and things like that. When you have those moments where you might not achieve your ego, how does it make you feel in the immediate aftermath? Like if we were talking to you two weeks after the tougher experiences you've had at UTMB, how would you be processing that in the moment? Yeah, it sucks because I mean, I remember last year finishing fourth but kind of going through low moments and not really finishing the race, how I would have liked and feeling like I had an opportunity basically I have been feeling like I was waiting an entire year every single day for UTMB to come back and then finally it was August again and I'm just like, oh my gosh, it's finally like this is the month and then finally race week, race day. Pretty insane and just part of it just, you feel so patient that it's taken day after day after day and you kind of, yeah, it's on my mind. There's no way I don't have internal pressure about it. I've set out to do that and I mean, it's pretty foreshadowing to move to France to kind of focus on that race specifically. Like there's no hiding the intention of why I'm here and what I'm trying to do. So yeah, definitely an all-in approach but it was a long year of waiting and yeah. Yeah, I was excited to finally have another chance but also just like, all right, here's another chance. Don't make it another year of waiting. It reminds me so, it reminds me so much of like Glebron James in basketball or something where he's conquered everything there is to conquer almost and a season is defined by whether they can win the NBA championship, at least to some people or at least that's the way goals are set often organizationally or whatever. Running as an individual sport may be a little bit different but at the same time, when you get to the start line or you're in those big build weeks of training before this year, what's going, how do you talk to yourself about that? Because you've been at UTMB a fair number of times, every single time I think you probably have the fitness to win on the right day and it just wasn't that right day. How are you talking to yourself this year? Are you saying I'm gonna win this or do you have like a more loose approach? Is there any way that you found to get yourself ready to perform when it's that much pressure and that much of the season is riding on it? I think there's less focus on trying to envision like you're gonna win it as much as envisioning that especially through my experiences at UTMB that more or less mentally preparing for it's gonna be a dog fight, it's not gonna be easy. It doesn't matter if you're winning. It doesn't matter if you're losing. I mean, to finish second, third, fourth, fifth, it hurts just as bad as the winner going through to, like it doesn't make it easier or worse or like it's about par everybody's on their limit and pretty broken especially late in the race. So really envisioning that side of it and trying to be more mentally prepared that it's okay to be there, it's okay to be broken and to find positive momentum to continue pushing forward. And in the past, I think when you, and especially I think people beginning in the sport really see that and they feel that about themselves in their race and there's less perspective actually acknowledging that everyone's going through it and they think it's unique to them that they're falling apart and more or less that couldn't be the furthest from the truth and the people that everyone says crushed it, said course record did whatever. They're suffering at the front too. It's just sometimes it's more about being mentally prepared to kind of suck it up and soldier on a bit with it depending on the scenario. But if you're feeling good and you can eat a bit, it's going to be mostly pretty crappy for everyone and just pushing, pushing, pushing when everyone has a low moment. Yeah. How did that play out during the race? Because starting out at UTMB, it seemed like you struggled a little bit early on and then there was kind of some of these moments where things started to transform and click. Did you think about history during those moments or do you think about history at all as you were racing? What are the, I mean, there's these huge narratives on you as an athlete. Do you picture those during the race itself? Sometimes you can get a little emotional thinking about potentially winning a race before it's actually happened. And yeah, I think I've had that happen and it followed part or it happens before you end up still holding on. But I think try not to focus too much on that in the race because you have so much still to, like in front of you to still work on and still get through. So to get caught up in anything like that, I don't think it was until I was really valicine. I think I had a good feeling that things were gonna be fine. And then, but then I would say I knew I moved up from valicine to love pleasure, good enough that pretty much someone wasn't gonna eat enough time to be within striking distance on the descent. So finally, on the descent, I got to kind of maybe take the foot off the pedal a bit. As far as low moments and stuff, I mean, I think the race was almost just a carbon copy from 2022. Killian wasn't in the race, but pretty much, I felt more in the role of Killian from last year and Zach was more in my shoes from 2022. I almost have an identical low point from Bertone to Benotti, which is about, I think, 100K to 110K, maybe, kind of area just after Kormaier. And Zach was on fire during that section, but then I realized I didn't really lose any time on the climb up to Grand Calf Ray. So, and I knew a split wasn't bad that I ran. I didn't run maybe as fast as I wanted to, but it wasn't bad. I just, I could see Zach was actually running really fast and feeling really good and just kind of had to wait it. But on the backside of Grand Calf Ray, starting to ask more questions of who's behind me, what's going on, how far back am I gonna, like how many people are gonna pass me? And just hanging in, hanging in, hanging in, but then made a few changes, shoe change, finally got in some calories, some caffeine, and Champé Locke, and you switched to kind of a, or I at least switched to a little bit of a lighter setup with my mandatory gear of, instead of having a bit heavier, more durable stuff through the night, I'll have some things that'll like gloves jacket, you can switch out or pants, switch out that you use during the night, but then you want a lighter version during the day and you're not gonna touch them when it's pretty hot out. So the pack, and then you only have nutrition for two hours instead of six hours, so that makes probably the biggest weight difference. So a couple things and you hit a little bit of a road section afterwards and that changes the stride a little bit. So I think a few things all came together to just finally filing, feeling like things are clicking and I could feel I was catching, making some time up, but I didn't realize how quickly I was actually making time up until I spotted Zach, maybe when he was about four minutes away, there was a big elbow in the trail and I could see him across the valley and I was just like, oh man, and I took a, basically a mental split of, I looked at my watch and was like, I need to check when I get there how much time that is and it was about four minutes and I knew basically that meant I ate six minutes up but really, really quick and that was quite surprising and I didn't know if that was me moving forward or him moving back, but in retrospect, it's me moving forward, I would say. I don't think Zach had much of a weak point in his race. I think he ran really, really well. So I think that's just so cool. I feel like there's a moment there that will go down in history. As there is... Well, not the past, more of the moment of when the narrative shifted, when it sounds like with Jess, your crew, you might have done some changes in the approach because we were there and got to see you, you looked amazing whenever we saw you, but at the same time, like when we were tracking right, well, these splits don't usually go this direction and then reverse and what makes you so special is even though in the past, you have been in these situations where the splits had started going the wrong direction and you still recovered, but maybe didn't have this transcendent day. Somehow you hit that point where you were like thinking about people behind you. I mean, at one point, I think you fell into third and that's not the type of thing where usually we see one of the best performances of all time come from that. Like it was a feat of mental resilience and strength in that moment. So was there anything that you told yourself to help with that process outside of the logistics of changing hearing stuff? Because I think every one of us in life has these moments where the trajectory starts going in the wrong direction and we're like, oh, fuck, this is my future. Like how did you do that? Yeah, I am not exactly sure because it was going that direction mentally for me too. But for the most part, I think another thing I can think of is I had a few more calories in my bottles at night and I was still sipping on the bottles well, even though maybe I wasn't eating as many of my gels in bars, which I had hoped to eat more, but the bottles were still going down so I was still getting over 200 calories so I was hanging in there, hanging in there. But more or less, it was just being able to hang in there when I wasn't feeling good that still have a chance. And I think when Jermon caught me, I was like, man, he's gonna win. Like he's gonna catch Jack and he's gonna go on. Like he must be moving forward, but there was a little bit of a moment of just seeing someone in as much difficulty as I felt, but actually seeing someone, you're like, it's another reminder that we're all in the same boat, things are fine, don't panic. Like this is where you're supposed to be, this race is difficult. This is fine, as everything burns around you. Exactly, like, did you find yourself? So I mean, I feel like I saw you, I got goosebumps actually watching you do the final climb to left legendary, you were running so fast. And I was like, dude, Jim, you got it locked up. You can show man, did you find yourself as you were, as you made the move on Zack and you passed, was there a particular type of terrain that you were looking forward to? You were like, this is my Jan, this is my shit. I got this, whether it's uphills, flats, non-technical, technical, or you're just good at all. Cause that's how it seems when we watch you run on the live feed or see you live. But what type of terrain do you thrive on when you're in these moments? I think it has to be a little bit comparative of maybe where I have a greater strength compared to other people. With Zack, I could tell perhaps really steep climbing where everyone has to hike. I had a big strength difference and that's been something I've been working on a lot, especially where I'm living here in France. We have lots and lots of steep climbs that you have to hike day to day in your training. So I do confidence mainly on the Montedubo vine which is the climb from Champé Locke before triant. And then I knew that they changed the climb a little bit out of triant up this. You had over a mile at 30% where usually you switch back a different one. And most people were gonna hit that and just feel a complete wall. Whereas 30%'s not so uncommon where I'm living. So I knew I could probably hike that a lot faster than anyone and I mean I hiked it just probably like everyone else but I think I probably hiked it five minutes faster than everyone else. So that was a point I was really looking forward to. And then surprisingly like I only scouted out the last climb because they changed it I think sometime like a week or so before the course they made an official call to change the last climb a little bit. And we ran it in 2017 because they changed it I think during the course because of weather. So I'd done it once but I remember the memory of that it was just so awful. And I was like I need to do this thing again. But the descent is pretty awful. It's really, really technical. But I think comparatively technical-wise, I tend to do pretty well on technical terrain. So I figured that could be a fairly good moment plus I found that the last climb probably wasn't most efficient to hike. That it was probably 10 to 15%. There may be moments of hiking but for the most part it was actually not as steep as the two previous climbs. So my strategy was with that. If I could jog it, I would jog it because when I did a little run through on Wednesday before the race, my takeaway was that running was significant like probably five to 10 minutes faster per mile. To just do a simple jog, same effort than it was because it just wasn't steep enough to step it out. I love that. Yeah, we have this thing on here called team never hike where I mean, obviously you have to hike in many situations. But if you can run a few more steps of a climb just how much of a difference it makes both mentally and physically. And as you're running up that climb from La Flajar I was like, we need to get a team never hike shirt. He's like embodying it beautifully. So that was so cool to see. Did you feel like your ankle? So I really feel for you on ankles. Did you feel like your ankle was holding up? I know you, prior to this race, you had an ankle injury where you had to drop out of worlds. How was that coming into the race being on such technical terrain? How did you navigate that? I would say I was able to build up my confidence through training enough that it wasn't an issue during the race. But it was a pretty bad ankle sprain in the beginning of May and kind of the recovery that I had to take for it was how I learned maybe how bad it really was because I tried to push through it initially. I mean, I think I took three days off of running but then went straight back into like 115 miles with 40,000 feet or something. And the ankle just every day was getting completely swollen back up that it was just something was wrong. And then my Achilles started having a lot of issues as well and I was just realizing like it was spiraling out of control rather than being able to train through it and it was going to need to be treated. So I would say I took extra time off like probably extra two or three weeks after people told me I should start trying to run. It just didn't feel right. So I took as much time as I could and finally I would say I started maybe one week with one week despair to kind of do my ideal build up from zero to getting ready for UUTMB. Maybe I had one leisure week of flexibility if something else popped up or I had a problem but for the most part it was on pretty tight timeline to get from how much time I did take off from the ankle to finally trying to get the training that I wanted to get in and I would say by the end of it I was pretty confident because I was able to get in all of my training without any issues or hiccups. So and then in addition in years past I think I've really flirted with overtraining for especially UUTMB and especially with the turnaround between Western states and UUTMB. So before I even did any training I just kept of where I wouldn't go above and I pretty much almost stepped to that but pretty close and so I think that was pretty key too to not seek to push for more and more and more even though things felt good. That's incredible. Yeah, one of the things to me that I just wanted to jump in for our listeners is I don't know if everybody that follows the sport and just like kind of the ultra end realizes that you've made yourself through training the best at everything. You don't necessarily do the short stuff as much but you have things like the Mount TAM FKT and shorter distance events and we've talked about it on the podcast before. I raised you back in 2016 before you had really established yourself internationally though you were already Jim Womzli we just didn't know and you beat me by like miles at a 30K. Actually, you were warming up. I saw you Jim warming up and I told David I was like I'm so sorry and I believe in David so hard and I've like almost never said that before. And it was just like, second place is okay. I just saw beauty happen and it was just, it was so cool seeing you warm up and then just seeing you absolutely wrecked shit but what that draws home to me is when you're talking about training you just gave us a little hint into that and I'd love to talk a little bit more about it. You've developed a training philosophy for yourself that works so well and you apply it to a bunch of different things. It's not just, oh, I'm gonna be good. I'm gonna do a ton of work and be good at just these long ultras. You have shown that you can apply it to whatever you set your mind to whether it's like a world championships an ultra short FKT something like that. So I'd actually love to hear a little bit about your training because before this race, you went dark on Strava publicly, I think. And so I think a lot of us out there that are big fans are like, what's Jim doing? So what motivated the decision first to stop publicly uploading all of your runs to Strava? Yeah, so I guess answer that first. It just kind of, I think I wanted to keep it like almost 50-50 before a world's like not try to key some cards to myself, but then it turned into the ankle injury popped up. I just had to really focus on myself and day by day what I needed to do and not feel like I needed to progress in a certain speed or anything like that. It was like, wasn't planning the next week really until I felt comfortable with the week I was currently in and where I saw that going. So I would say it was so such short-term planning on what next week would look like that I needed to focus a bit more on myself with that and that I just didn't need the noise of people seeing things go good or seeing things go bad. In this case, it would have been probably people getting so excited that things were going so well because I mean, even still I have things that I haven't unprivated that I think, they're pretty crazy, I had maybe a 14-hour long run from my house that was pretty crazy. That was kind of the main long run but I think it was only 50 miles but it had maybe 8,000 meters of climbing quite a bit just up and down and lots of hiking and it even finished kind of flat just to get in some miles and scout out actually a race I did maybe two weeks after that to scout out the end of that course but you need to break the internet. Just put it all public at once. Let all the Strava segments go down. All of them on the bridge. Well, the biggest thing to not do that is I have to go back and make everything on private all one at a time. There's no easy way to do it. Oh, I'll do that for you too. I don't care enough to go back and do too much but part of that I've also wondered about of like when I've gone back to Western states and I've gone back and done other races of how much that lets other people have at least like kind of the playbook of how I did it. I think it's playing a bit too nice to give everyone an identical carbon copy to work with to try to replicate but at the same time I think what I've also realized through Strava's I do have a bit of an ability for volume and kind of pretty in tune with what I think is the right pace but tends to be probably too fast for most people. If you try to copy it it tends to not work out as well so it just goes to its individual for me but people probably would need to tweak it as is and then rewinding a little bit more. The first time we actually raced was at the same race you're thinking of in 2016 that don't fence me in but we're actually race in 2014. Oh, for the first time there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where? Oh, stop that man, yeah. Cause I was living in Montana at the time so I was a local. I don't know how that went but yeah. Yes, that. And then I don't know if you actually actually know that race. You were at a way too cool. I've actually DNFed way too cool in 2015 but I was there racing that one too. Okay, by the transit of property, Jim has DNFed to race that I have won which means that I know. And I think actually what you said about training in the playbook is really fascinating because we get windows directly into a lot of pro athletes' internal narratives. And you are held up on a pedestal within the sport for a lot of very valid reasons. At the same time, people that have tried to duplicate that have often found themselves at a puddle on the side of the trail. And it just hasn't worked out for them in the same way. How do you think you've been able to balance the focus on training in a methodical way where I always try to tell people like you're brilliant on this training theory stuff. They, it's obvious and you're doing it in such a way that is like perfect for you. How have you balanced that accumulation of stress with recovery? How have you made it work? Because when you first came onto the scene, I remember people whispering like, oh, this isn't gonna be sustainable. Not only has it been sustainable, you have only improved. You have totally proved all those bitches wrong. How is that possible? I think perhaps people underestimate how powerful it is to make life boring and simple and kind of joke with just that one of my superpowers is to basically turn off as well. So I can train big, say, five hours in a day, but then outside of that, I turn off pretty good, which means I'm pretty useless outside of training going on. But I would say it's one of my superpowers to turn off that way. And then I think, even I like reading your articles where you've adjusted some training philosophies and summarized them a lot simpler than reading papers and papers and papers of research, which has been really fun. And I think you cranked out a few really interesting ones all within this like a couple of months. And it was almost like, man, I think he's almost going too fast and missing some of the good nuggets right now. But depending on what you're doing, but I really, so I guess one of the hard things is I've never taken the time to really try to synthesize what I'm doing, what I'm, my goal is in training what my philosophy is. So for me to talk about it to a little bit, just kind of beessing because it's a bit off to top of my head, but I've really always identified, especially it's because maybe it's becoming more trending, but the theory of kind of the zone to long, long training and I think I can look back until my high school training of just, I've always felt like I identified with volume based training with really minuscule amounts of stimulus to get fast. Like I kind of get maybe even 90% of my speed within just a couple of weeks. Like I'm just not going to get fast, fast enough to win true track races. And that was maybe even one of the more depressing parts about racing track back in the day is like, people would be able to sharpen, sharpen, sharpen. And I would hit most of my best fitness just off the volume, get a couple workouts in and probably hit about what I was gonna hit for a PR. But then people would hit more quality workouts, workouts workouts, and I would just start falling apart over the season and it just didn't work for me. I think the change to train for a race every month or every two, three months, that sort of flow of training, race, training, race rather than the traditional high school college running background of racing once or twice a week. Didn't work well for me. So there's a couple shifts that way. And then you've also digest a big training philosophy on I mean, one of the most trendy things right now is the Norwegian training method and the double threshold stuff, kind of what to hit. And for the most part, I find it irrelevant to overtraining too quickly for ultra. It just takes too much energy wise for at least me when I apply it. However, when I do something like I've dropped down to do a half marathon before, I found with just two to three weeks of double workouts twice a week, I can hit pretty much close to my potential. What I feel like I'm gonna hit in a half marathon basically off of ultra training and then just quickly switching gears and then just doing a half marathon off of like that double threshold sort of work. So I found if potentially you're doing a shorter race, you can get a lot of sharpening really quick. But for the most part, my training's pretty boring as volume-based. It's gotten a lot steeper over the years. It's a lot more vertical. So I think there's a lot of underestimated strength that comes with concentrating on vertical and what happens is your hours of training go up and then more and more and more, you're getting into that zone two area of where you're just flirting in for hours upon hours and then all of a sudden there's different ways to think about it. But potentially even like pushing your threshold essentially faster, faster, faster. So you have a clear knack for training theory. It's really fun actually to hear you describe this whole process. I feel like my hot take is that Jim Womzly would be an incredible coach. Across many different disciplines, I feel like trail, altars, short distances track, it would be so cool to see your coach. But you need a book, The Jim Womzly Method. We can be your ghost writers just to help because I think you have totally shifted a lot of what people think training theory could become and you've influenced so much of how everyone thinks, including people like Killian I think. Like you have helped guide the entire sport, very cool stuff. It's so cool. Do you have a general framework for how you make decisions surrounding your own training? Like is this something, are you describing yourself more as like a sole runner? So you wake up in the morning and you feel called to do something specific or you kind of like mapping this out over both micro and macro cycles? I would say micro macro cycles would be the most accurate way because for the most part day to day, I would say throughout the week, I can do anything what friends are up to do. So meeting up with friends is one of the most motivating ways to get out for training, especially when you're tired. So being able to have a few people, but then I say like when it comes Saturday, my week's in on Sunday, so which even just a seven day training cycle is pretty arbitrary and I've always, I've tried to switch to a 10 day cycle and it just didn't work. I started adding up the numbers and I was just doing less and less. So I don't know, but in, I'm used to seven days, Strava logged in in seven days, so it works, but it's interesting to change the number of days. But my week's in on Sunday and I just say like Saturday, Sunday I tend to be a lot more strict on what I have to do because I'm looking at it from a weekly perspective. And for the most part, I'm happy if I hit my weekly numbers. And so for four or five days of the week, I'm definitely pretty flexible on what I'm trying to do and what route I'm doing. And it kind of goes to, well, who's motivated to do what? And yeah, that sounds fun. Like let's go do it and how does it work in with the week? And if you're on top of your week, then Saturday Sunday become really, really easy. And then if you get caught going to do something fun on Saturday Sunday, sometimes you overshoot and do too much, but you just have to keep it in mind. And then maybe the next week, you don't have to bump up. You're fine enough. And but I think as I've shift focus from where I've been at, where I started in say 2016 to 2018-19 to 21, 22, 23, there's been just a massive shift in perspective of vertical training per week, which I think is pretty correlated with time. I haven't been able to separate the two if I'm doing a certain distance with the amount of climbing. The time ends up being pretty consistent. So I'm tracking all three, but mostly it's distance in vertical and I'm interested in the amount of time, but less worried about it, where it's also interesting to think about other sports that are almost purely based time-based, whether it's cycling, skiing, swimming, I think can be time-based too. So those sports come in with a really nice perspective, because I think when you shift a bit more to time-based, it becomes more patient. You're less rushed to get it done because it doesn't matter how fast, how slow you do it, five hours is five hours, whether you cover 30K or 50K, that doesn't matter so much. So there's been a big shift towards that perspective within the training. We found the same thing with, we still plan almost exclusively, though there are some variants with distance for athletes that are doing tons of dirt. And I think part of it is just like, we found that there's usually general correlation, but sometimes there isn't an athlete so often under do it on time-based, but totally in the kind of the same boat with that. So as you're talking about volume accumulation and these weekly cycles that you're thinking about, as you build up to UTMB, what type of ranges are you generally targeting in your build weeks? Yeah, so I mean, the goal for this one was to hit three weeks of 125 miles with 45 to 55,000 feet. And it was actually surprising that I think Zach was getting a really good sense of where he's at and what he needs to do because our numbers were very, very similar. I think he was a little above me in volume just a bit. So it was interesting to keep an eye on Zach and watch his because he was logging up publicly and I'm a dork, I like checking up on people. But the other interesting side of it is I've done volume like that at altitude and I've just done it mostly out of like camping out of a tent and I think that's what David Hedges did for Nolan's. It's hard work and it takes like it's toll on you where Zach's actually got just the luxury bus going on when he's out in the mountains. That could be a huge influence on helping increases recovery but I found that training in Colorado at high altitude doing that sort of hurt. I mean, I've gotten extremely fit but then transferring it over to traveling and then showing up and getting it all to click on the right day has been complicated and that's where being based in France instead has really simplified so many factors to just make showing up for the day a lot more consistent. So even like 2022 where maybe I considered a bit almost day, it almost happened but all in all it ended up maybe following a little bit on wasn't my best performance, that was still pretty good. So I think reducing so many variables has helped increase the consistency of what sort of expectation to have on race day. I love how you're talking about Zach in the mountains with his van and I could just see him with like eight trillion waffles to power his training. What have you done from a feeling perspective? It's a lot of training and have you had to shift your fueling for recovery purposes or even your fueling? I feel like right now we're entering the air of what Dave and I have called food doping. I feel like we're seeing just these huge amounts of caloric intake during exercise. How have you thought about fueling both in terms of recovery and during training as well? Yeah, so with that too, I think there's a different mindset in fueling between Americans and the rest of the world, like usual. The main thing being, it's pretty related, but as Americans, we count in calories, which is sometimes inaccurate, depending on what you're looking at, whereas Europeans are purely counting in grams of carbohydrates, and it's a much more informational piece because for the most part you're not seeing Europeans try different crazy diets and try to make it work. And so you're not counting the protein or the fat in the content. You want a mix of fructose, glucose, sort of ratio, and that kind of two to one, I guess one to two, in that order ratio. I've been sugar based, but when you also, again, look at Europeans who are probably, I would say, overall more successful on long, like say, 24 hour ultra events. Their nutrition looks a lot different to the sugar based stuff. Like it's no wonder Americans are having so many stomach aches at these races or me specifically, at least. And it kind of sucked, because when I laid out my nutrition plan for this year, for the most part, what I was carrying was still just sugar based. But, and I know when I started this sport in 2015-16, I told a couple of people that I was having, I mean, so I was counting calories at the time, but I would have up to 400 calories an hour for, say, Lake Sonoma. And people were calling bullshit, but if you rewind it, all of a sudden, it's, that's 100 grams of carbohydrates per hour. And now you're looking at that's pretty much the norm, at least in cycling. I would say it's on the extreme side of running still, especially after 12, 16 hours. I find just to do sugar becomes extremely difficult. However, I've played around a lot more with textures. So you have liquid gel bars that I've tried to kind of play around with timing of which and when. And for the most part, it seems like a lot of people, you can try to do bars and gels and less calories in your bottle from the beginning and a longer ultra and then move to gels and maybe a stronger concentration. And at the end, you're typically still thirsty, so you can still sip on something that's kind of sweet. It's not too too bad. So that kind of theory and then kind of just kicking out any sort of candy related stuff at the aid station. This was the first year that I guess kind of just a night together made more of a game plan on what we were going to have at the aid station and trying to make it as more like real food-ish. Like the closest thing to candy, we had where these biscuit cookies, but what they provided was this like super big crunch sensation. So when you look at another place to study for the sport is actually, through hiking is really interesting to me how they get over taste fatigue, flavor fatigue, all sorts of things. But there's this like, I don't know, a name off the top of my head, but she's from Scotland and she's like, hiked everything. But she talks a lot about changing up the textures. So crunchy, smooth, interesting, liquid and how that can really help digest continue to eat. Because the name of the game is to continue to eat. And so at different times, you can still manage something. But at our aid stations this year, some of the main things we had were going through Alan Lim's scratch thing, trying to make some sticky rice recipes. But we went with a vegetarian savory option with some avocado and egg on the sticky rice, but we kind of messed up. We need to keep practicing our sticky part of the sticky rice. And then some cashews that were unsalted, some, instead of going with just pickles, it went to pickled chips, pickled flavored cuddled chips with some crunch, the biscuit cookies. And then melons have always gone down well and ultra specifically like cantaloupe or honey dew, which in France, they just call it melon, which is pretty funny, melon. Everything's going to be good. So how about outside of the training, like how much are you thinking about day-to-day nutrition? So one of the things that's become harder this year is that I don't have a nutrition sponsor. So I'm buying most of the things that almost everything this year. And when you're making purchases of like $1,500 worth of nutrition, because I think it's important to feel during training, I think you get a lot more quality out of your training and you get a lot less residual fatigue. And so I've always been a big eater during training. However, I would say training with Francois has opened up maybe timed efforts with a little bit more depletion, but we kind of play a little games without some time of more or less who can go the longest without eating and first one eats a little bit of the loser. But then we've also played games where we do that, but maybe the second person that eats is maybe going to be the loser, the big loser, because the end of it just doesn't come back because you just went a little too deep because you were too stubborn not to grab a snack first when you needed it. And some of that, I think, I'm sorry, sorry to jump in, but how often would you say you did those types of depletion? Because even though we're the ultimate proponents of fueling everything, there are complications, obviously, with fat oxidation and things like that. Like how often would you do that type of thing in training where you did a little bit more depletion? So I didn't do any of that during this block. And I would say I'd probably get away from that during important blocks because I think you really need to factor in that if, especially if you're doing it on a longer effort, it's over five hours, you might pay it back more than you would like and you're gonna have residual fatigue a lot more. So we would do it more during schema season when it was probably less important, I would say. So a bit more of the off-season cycles is when we would do it. I wouldn't play the beat this is much better. During this summer. Have you used anything like ketones at all in this process? Not recently. I would say before ketones really hit the main stream stuff I had a friend and flagstaff try to recommend him to me and he knew enough to be weary of it that it might be pseudo this or that. For the most part, it's interesting. I don't think there's general good enough knowledge how when to use them and you can also get weird side effects upset stomach potentially too much peeing and stuff. So I don't regularly, I don't use it anymore but I've tried implementing something before they're really, really expensive if you have to buy them. So I don't think it's ultimately worth it unless you can get a ketone sponsorship and maybe you can learn to use it in a positive way. But for the most part, I haven't found it overly successful. They'll give you part of the company. If you decide that you'll say that you use them. Okay, so going back to training, like with how about structured workouts? Are you doing structured workouts in the context of some of those big UCNB weeks? The answer's no. So there were probably zero structured workouts. However, I think I had a little more fun with it and it's become more of finding the right segment and just maybe this strides the day before two days before and then just trying to hit a segment and just using that as your workout effort. And typically I kept those on your 20 minute efforts but in over 20% gradients. So I think I did one at the beginning of the block and I was expecting, so I really wanted to do a TT up a climb here called Cuvie which is the main ski hill that you see out of Aresha, the main town. And went full gas, hit it when I think after my first week of 100 miles during my block. So I might have had five main weeks during my block 100 and then maybe 125, 125, 125 and then back to 115 maybe. But then the verticals in there, so yeah. But first week, I want to hit it on week 105 and then hit it again on the fifth week and it actually surprisingly just went so well on the first one, I'm not going back to do it because I'm probably only gonna take away a negative side of it and then by the end of the block I was kind of contemplating. I was really, really close to hitting, like pulling the trigger on doing the vertical K and Shamini on like Wednesday or Tuesday before the race or maybe no, no, no, one, I think eight days before the race. I was looking at Hitnet, but it just went to, the more I analyzed it, I didn't want to go into Shamini when it was so busy, we'd probably have to stay the night because going back to original question Megan asked, we live about an hour or 50 minute drive from Shamini but it's all on complete switchback roads both ways. So it's not the easiest drive, it's quite exhausting. So to do two hours there, two hours back, hit everything, it's easier for us to just stay in Shamini when we go. So more or less just went to, I can't waste my time with this. It would have been the ultimate, like I think gauntlet drop and I've kind of done that at some races. I did a big effort the Wednesday before ultra-trial Cape Town, sometimes I like doing that. So it would have been about a 30 minute, 32 minute effort to do that specific vertical, which was on the longer side of it. I think 30 minutes, you can start to get maybe too much residual fatigue, but then if you can keep it under 20. So I ended up doing one just at our back door that a friend hit one day and I was just like, all right, the weather's pretty good, I'll just go do it and I did it the same day. And that one's I think 26% and 1.2 miles. So that one was 16 minutes, it was a pretty good one. But I think one thing that I've found out since I've been in France, because I've started doing a lot more vertical races is that surprising, maybe surprising, unsurprising, but I think I actually have a better talent in the vertical racing than I ever realized. So I've started enjoying doing some more vertical races and I'm actually doing a vertical kilometer on Saturday, but I'm actually kind of banged up for a bike fall two days ago and I'm not, I was pretty optimistic now. I did it last year, about two, three weeks after UTMB and it went really well, but right now, I'm not sure how I'm gonna feel. I just did the route today, but my glutes all messed up from falling on a bike. So, but not even the wrong, yeah. It's so wild. Your range is so impressive. And it's so cool to think about if you went to the VK in Germany, like the week before the race, it would have blown minds, just have that one upload on Saturday. Yeah, just let that be the one that's predicting heading into the race. So it goes into a very silly and ask sort of mind game that Kylian does all the time. And I think people, all the time people used to get psyched out, but I think more and more and more, there's probably a lot of similarities between myself and Kylian and that sort of range where maybe difficult to point to other people doing everything like that. But Kylian, I think, would do that a lot in the past and people would just lose it. It must be fun to have that level of fitness where dropping one run is like a mind-fuck with someone on Strava, so that has to be so, so cool. What, you see, you're an incredible gravel biker. What percentage of those 125 mile weeks incorporate gravel biking? Nothing's, there was no biking during that. So, but then immediately following you to be biking for the next two weeks, so it's been basically about 10 hours, I think, last week on the bike. Not too much. I enjoy it. I'm not incredible bike handler. I can go uphill very, very quick on a bike, but that's about it. And I would say quick for an amateur, because I think I have huge respect for professional cyclists because I think just the pedal stroke in general is just an art form. And essentially, the amount of power that they can sustain is just, I'm just so inefficient comparatively, so it doesn't work. Yeah, so in the context of your training, you do a couple of these like harder efforts, big volume, big vert. How much do you think you're like hitting Z3 on some of the steeper climbs that you're doing in training? Like, you know, my theory always for you and please tell me if I'm wrong. Is that you're doing a Norwegian style of training sometimes without, or at least a lot, some threshold work, but without it necessarily being so structured in the context of some of the things I used to see on your Strava. Granted, you climb so efficiently that it's tough to tell, you know, without data. So like, do you think you're like on some of these climbs hitting low mod efforts? I mean, things that you can sustain for hours and hours and hours, but still a little bit beyond maybe traditional aerobic threshold. I would say a training block like for UTMB, I did a lot either by myself or with my friend Simone Goslin. And I would say it was very, very controlled. And that was another part of not being on Strava, not having pressure was just a, to probably keep it closer towards Z2. If you were to guess and define it because I'm not wearing a heart rate strap, I'm not, I'm not falling heart rate. It's effort based for me, which is wildly inaccurate. I guess scientifically speaking, but a heart rate strap that don't think are consistently accurate to rely on and then it's just almost impossible to really measure power like you would in cycling. So with that, it becomes pretty difficult to go reliably off of what zone you're actually in. The idea is that it's going to be very, very sustainable. And then, but, yeah, I mean, things get out of control at the time. Like I don't know, I don't care so much. Yeah, try not to worry about it. I love it. And the descents usually are going to be a lot more chill. I'm not, there's almost never a descents that I'm bombing for stimulation. Now that I say that, I guess there was one training run I did because I wanted a 1,500 meter descent in a long day at the very beginning of the day. So again, we can get that out of our doorstep. So it takes four miles to get up to 9,000 feet and you can drop 5,000 feet from that mountain straight down. So that was in a training run, but for the most part, it wasn't fast. It was more in just muscular idea behind it. And, but not not bombing descents. Where sometimes maybe I used to, yeah, when I was younger, I would say my recovery was better. I used to be able to do dumber things. So now I don't do as many dumber things, yeah. Like what I was able to do when I was 26, 27 kind of blows my own mind of like that's crazy, but then sometimes it starts to come back when I get into a really, really good shape still. It's so cool how you've evolved over time where you've worked within the same system, same approach, but let yourself grow, change, age, which has seemed to just give you more strength. You know, it's pretty wonderful. And I think, you know, gets to some of our things to just like, and gets where the end of the podcast. Like you've done it all now. You've conquered basically everything in the ultra end of the sport. What's your big scary goal after saying the course record at UTMB? Well, I would also say real quick, but like the course record wasn't, isn't really in mind that UTMB, I think it's one of the few races that it truly transcends the course record that if you're a UTMB winner, you're a UTMB winner because they've had so many alterations to the course. I think purely that's more important. And even this course was a variation of what's considered the standard course, but I think as you compare the numbers, there's more and more realization that it's pretty comparable if not slower, so it's fairly valid. But I would say the accomplishment of winning UTMB is good enough in itself. But what to do next, I think I'm at a point in my career where I need to continue to evolve those sort of motivations because if I'm not excited to do something different, to do something new, am I need to ask myself am I still excited to do the Western states, to do the UTMB, and does that motivate me enough to continue to be at the top of the sport? And I mean, more or less time will tell, and we'll see kind of how things plan out, but I'm trying to plan for next year and part of that is going to be trying to spend a little more time, especially the first half of the year back in Flagstaff. So just to have time with friends and family in the US. So it's something that we've missed being here in France. We've really, really enjoyed it. And we plan on spending more time in France longterm, but it's a point in our lives that we're going to take probably a dedicated like six, eight months to do mostly US-based. So we'll try to choose, well, yeah. And now looking at things that will probably be a two-year gap of even racing in the US for me, which is kind of a strange to think about US racers. I mean, I think only you can think of Katie Shiden, Hilary Girardi, but they like full-time live in France sort of thing that don't race in the US too often. Wow. I'm so excited you're coming back to the US. I know. David, we would have to move to Flagstaff. Proximity to greatness. Exactly. Actually, we were talking, we loved Shemini, and we're like, oh, we would have to move to Shemini, but I think that's out. Yeah, not that you're coming back. Not that you're coming back, that's out. That's fully out. But what do you feel like, I feel like Jim, you've already left this incredible legacy on the sport. And like, your accolades, who you are, what you've done, and how you've evolved training theory. Actually, one thing I wanted to jump in there is on that point, when we teased to some of our Patreon listeners that you'd be on, I got six different messages from people that you've done random acts of kindness to on the trail over the course of your life, that probably little things that you don't even remember, just whether they're racing or you saw them on the trail. So I think your legacy goes beyond these general big things to also just the people you've impacted directly. Well, I mean, it's wild. I feel like there's these big marks and then every little things responding to messages. But do you think about what you want your legacy to be from here on out? I mean, I obviously like, you've already left this huge legacy on sport. But what do you want it to be now going forward and how does that impact your motivation? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I've ever set out for a purpose or a goal to leave a sort of legacy. So it's, now people ask, but it's never been an intention, like my intention to kind of do that. It's just been to try to, I guess it's a point in my life of something to do and I just want to continue with that at this point and I don't know. I think even when you ask people that have had a big breakthrough and they've won the championship or won this or that, like what's next, it kind of just goes back to try to win it again, I guess, but the competition side of it definitely excites me. So it's hard to kind of chase some of the smaller races where they might have an old prestigious course record or mythical course record when it would just basically be a time trial off the front and not much to, like, okay, people expect you to break the course record and they want to see that and that'll be a great show. But say you don't get it, like it's a big risk for not much payoff and it's kind of hard to get motivated behind that sometimes. Whereas the competition, like, I mean, at UTMB, the number of people that have become friends within the sport and I'm just excited to see them because we're racing together throughout the race and especially early when I'm a bit more mixed up between more and more people or how many people, yeah, are supporting me along the course. It becomes just like that family and it's even been like, I've missed that part of my past career at Western States because it's been two, three years essentially since going back to Auburn, California and that area. I mean, I have a similar, like, kind of fairy tale breakthrough with Western States and a lot of those people feel familiar in, like, family in the same way that they're consistently there, consistently showing up and they keep falling you afterwards too. So there's some callings with that. Do you think you might go back to Western States? Yeah, so right now I'm racing niece 115K in two weeks to try to, because they changed the goal tickets. So I need, they changed it from UTMB. The initial plan was to have the option in my pocket after UTMB, but then they switched that up to CCC, but then interestingly enough, they added another French race and it's not too far, I don't have to fly. So the plan right now is still to do niece. I would say the ball hasn't gotten rolling on running yet. So we're just trying to remain patient, recover still, and just feel good by the race. But I'll be doing niece 115K with my friends, Simone Gosling, and then Jess will be doing the 50K there. So we're excited to go explore the South of France. I just got chills. I know it's so wild that even Jim has to just get a goal and ticket, like give the man a goal and ticket. There's other ways in there. Yeah, I feel like that should think I've always been a sucker for going for the goal and tickets, and I've always liked them. So I don't know. There's just no complication if you do it. I love it. I like you doing, I prefer niece as a coach who sends like athletes to Black Canyon and Canyon. Actually, David's doing grindstone coming here. I think I heard that. I heard that. Yeah, I've COVID-19. I've COVID-19, I've COVID-19 as a grindstone now. So which distance are you doing? About 100K. Okay, there's another whalmsling in the 100K. Oh, I'm so excited. How closely related? Like, what's the blood representation here? We might need to know this for your race, David. He's my twin brother. So it's oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. 100K. How's he? Oh, man, David, we're going to have one of those moments. There's another one. He's going to be warming up. I'm going to be like, I'm so sorry, David. I prefer turning whalms and he doesn't have the same running background. He's played Men's Rugby for his adult life and is built a bit different. But he's gotten into running the last couple of years and he's getting better and better and he's really excited to always have some improvement. That makes me so happy. Yeah, that's so cool. So one of the things I was thinking is that when we talk about the other sports, someone like Michael Jordan, if he saw the last hand documentary, he's like, and I took that personally about like, after a while, once you reach a certain level, it seems like these goats of sport end up like, yes, there's internal motivation, but also there's this, these external drivers too. As you're going through the process, are you aware of like quote, heaters or anything like that? And do you get any motivation from that as you make some of these next decisions, like anyone that might doubt you or anything like that? I think there used to be perhaps more of that side of it. Earlier in my career, and maybe, you quite a them all. Yeah, as a younger version, there might have been more of that and sort of motivation. I think at this point, I've gotten to meet more people and maybe at least kind of what's portrayed online of me is maybe shift it a bit in that I think more, my real personality comes through in less of the just trash talking everywhere. It's more, I'm excited to race hard. I'm excited to race friends. I'm excited to race new people, new places. And I think that sort of energy is a bit contagious. And we all feel that to a degree. So I think it's a healthier relationship with with running and not not worrying so much about any sort of haters and more or less, I mean, even during UTMB, I think I was Zach's biggest fan as he was just running past me of like, oh, me, and you're going to do it if all on a part. Like, yeah, I think I've said it before, but basically, if it's not me, I hope it's you. And I just for all of us, I hope one of us breaks through because we've all kind of carried a bit of that burden. And I think it's unnecessary, like, it just is what it is. And the French have produced really, really great champions at their own race. But hopefully we can block them out for a few years to come. Oh, my gosh. Any gym mom's lehator is like on the wrong side of history. Well, yeah, it's just fascinating to look back. And like, final reflection from me is thinking back to like, getting to have that conversation with you post race in 2016. And you know, I felt like I was like on the front end of it. Because I realized at that point, this guy, not just your physical attributes, but your mental approach, you're going to be the goat or at least like in competition for that. And to see the changes from the wrong turn at Western States, when you were on record pace, to how you dealt with that, to how you've shined your light throughout that process, through things like maybe how you were portrayed online, not being the gym I knew. And you've fully just embraced this with Jess. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. And like, as you reflect on those years, like what emotion comes to your head about, I mean, you know, you said 2015, 2016, going somewhat all in to now, being on top of this sporting world. Like, what emotion does that bring up to you? I'm really grateful for it. I think it just makes me like kind of, and I guess the other side of it goes to, I've heard people when I, especially I was a younger kid and stuff, they kind of say and like, just believe in yourself and bet on yourself and it's kind of cliche. You just go, oh, they're so talented. They could have done anything they wanted and they would have been successful at athletics. But for me, I would say things didn't come easy, it didn't come, nothing came the first try for the most part. So truly when I say like bet on yourself, like invest in yourself, I think that's one of the bigger takeaways. And but, I mean, I felt lucky of how things worked out with my relationship with Western states that even there's times in this point in the last year or two of just that one was just too good. Maybe at the end of the day, I'm just not meant to win UTMB and we'll see and I didn't want to even measure success failure based off of that. But to see this one kind of come together like another fairy tale, it's just, it's crazy and just like the only way to sum it up is just pretty grateful for committing into goals and trying to control what I can control and just improve upon where I'm coming from. We cried when you crossed the finish line. Yeah. Were there any tears for you after you crossed the finish line? For sure. Yeah, I completely lost it when I saw my aunt at the finish line, we were struggling with some health that she used and it was just a really special moment that she was there to share it and then I think Jess and I shared some tears together too just because we know that we've kind of tried to uproot our lives and flag staff to come here and it hasn't been easy. We've had difficulties like from just bureaucracy side of things, but even like Jess isn't working here so she feels sometimes like less motivated. I'm like, well, yeah, it's like not having a structure. It's not always the best thing. Like you got to, it's sometimes not motivating to get out the door when you have all day to get out door. When you have just a window, sometimes it's actually surprisingly maybe a better thing. So having some of that structure, some of that self-discipline side of things has been a struggle for both of us, but I've had to kind of manage that for a few more years where it's something new to Jess, but she's had a really like, yeah, great growth here and she's enjoying it now more than ever as we both become more comfortable here. You two are such a super team. It's such a super team, my gosh, it's wild. And I'm so excited you're coming back to the US. Yes, mostly it's taking me on our show the time zone, actually, yeah. And also we can start the Jim Womsley method. It won't just be about running. We're going to talk about belief. We're going to talk about everything. Shootin' your shot. You're going to sell two million copies and it's going to go mainstream. So Jim, we're your biggest fans of life and we can't wait to see what you do next on and off the trails. You're a fucking superstar. Well, thanks so much, yeah. You're way too complimentary and it makes me blush and, but I love your positive attitudes with everyone and I think it just comes through as just a really genuine person and it's contagious to have that happiness. So I love what you guys do and keep sharing the love on the trails too. Well, we'll have to end with something embarrassing. Jim, whenever something goes well in our house and we have to save it, I would say we use this like once a month. It's like something really good. We say boom boom with a Joom Joom. So like Joom Joom is something that we've heard you called before, so we say Joom Joom a lot. Yes. Whenever we're really happy, we go boom boom with a Joom Joom and then high five. Yeah. So it's kind of embarrassing, but you live with us like once a month and a half, yes. All the great things in our house. We just channel the Joom Joom. Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Jim, we can't, yeah, you're the best. Tell Jess that we absolutely love her too and we're so proud of you both. So our hope, channel some of that hope that absolute belief that you have and see what big things are ahead. You rock, Jim. Awesome. Thanks guys. Hey. See you.