180. Strength Work and Muscle Fibers, UTMB Controversy Updates, Creatine, and Speed in Ultras!

We are so happy to be with you today. Happy Tuesday. It's Tuesday. And I'm so pumped for Tuesday over here and so pumped out. So pumped out. What do you mean by that? I am sore everywhere. Like you don't want to like climbers say they're pumped. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how I feel. And usually it's like the intrinsic finger muscles and things like that. Every part of my body feels like that. Whenever a climber says they're pumped or whatever, I always laugh because I've never gotten it from climbing. But I have gotten it from like carrying groceries. Yeah. I'm like one trip to Trader Joe. Yeah. I'm like one trip to Trader Joe's is as good as going up El Capitan for me. Say with carrying Leo up the stairs. I'm like my thumb is so pumped. So pumped. Okay. So why are you sore? Why are you pumped out, Megan? Because I'm doing my couch to 50k training plan again. How many times do you think you have to take like extended periods of time doing absolutely nothing to qualify as couch to 50k training. I like it. You're just returning to the couch. Yes. Much like Sam and returned to where they were born. Unfortunately, they're doing it to die. You're doing it just to reset after heart condition things. So hopefully not die. Yes. But I mean, I feel like I just make this like seasonal return to the couch. And then I come back to training. And honestly, here's what I figured out too is that there's so much joy in coming back to running. Yeah. And I get to experience it over and over and over again. I slightly disagree with there being joy when coming back to running. Actually, yeah, I agree with that. The first five days are heinous and horrible. And every muscle feels pumped out. But once you get past that point and you're like doing airplane arms flowing downhill, it's the best life. And I would take some couch time and exchange for it. Okay. Well, that's really cool. I think you're dealing with a level of talent here that I do not have. Because when I, if I had to do what you did, these trips to the couch, I would feel so bad. Not just for five runs, but for an extended period of time. Meanwhile, you come back on your first run and you're running like an efficient leopard princess. I don't know how it happens, but you know, I guess you take the talent with some of the bad, which is sometimes your heart go boom. Oh, thank you. Well, this leopard princess has domes over here. Yeah. So it doesn't make me feel quite like a princess. So what exactly is sore because you did a 50 mile ride yesterday. You've done a couple six or eight mile runs. So what exactly is sore and what is it from? Basically everything but my heart. Literally everything is sore. I'm like, did I use my neck for either my ride? It's like my pussy, my crack. All of that. Like we're just going to like go down the chain like a rapper. Yeah. Everything is sore except for my heart. And I actually like, my heart feels 100%. Yeah. So I'm really pumped in that. I'm like, you're back. Not your heart and your crack. Actually, I miss my back when I went down the equation. Yeah. Is your back sore? No, really. Okay. You know, everything spared the back. Okay. So that makes me so happy. I'm just so it's so exciting to see you back out there because like you're feeling great. Every time you get back from your bike rides, I'm just like, wow. She's the happiest person I've ever seen. Biking makes me unreasonably happy. Yeah. Even happier than running. I should change my Instagram handle at this point. It's Meg runs happy. It should be Meg bikes happy. Meg bikes really happy. Really, really weirdly happy. Yeah. Or gasmically happy. It's kind of strange, but no, I love it so much. Actually, maybe it's because we live in like the biking mecca of the world. Like I said, we have the best gravel roads out here and it's so easy to bike. When I travel, I'm like, fuck biking. This is inconvenient. Oh, yeah. It's like you had a bike with you though. You'd be into it. Okay, but if I had a bike with me, you got to fly the bike there. That's true. You got to rent one for like $150 a day. So it's an incredibly convenient sport here in Boulder. Outside of that, the difficulty of biking starts to expand. Well, I feel like wherever you are, as long as you have your bike, like in your home, it's good. I feel like you would like South Dakota biking, as long as we lived in South Dakota. Okay, that's true. Yeah, I would get out there and I'd be wearing like so many puffy coats in just being ready to rock. But you and I did. What? I think I'm going to sign up for a race. What? Wait, are we talking bike races or run races? Actually, it's a good point. We're on, I think both. Yeah. So I want to try some gravel racing coming up. Oh, fuck yes, Meg, and this makes me so happy. So I'm very excited about that. Fuck around and find out. Yeah. It's like our new, I mean, I just will try it in a different sport and see what happens. Well, that makes me so happy because like, you know, I came from a cycling background for those that are just tuning into this episode for the first time. Probably you were a little bit put off by some of the pussy and crack content already. But I started as a cyclist. So I was a football player. Then I got into biking and then running came much later. And I got okay at cycling, but it gave me a really good context for the sport. Understanding numbers and things like that. Well, your power numbers are amazing. No, no, no. Like outstanding. Your bike handling, like metrics, abilities are very poor. And there's kind of this like disconnect between the two of them. I think I'm improving a bike handling with age. I think perhaps it's one of those things where when I was young, I didn't have the skills to back up the fearlessness. And now I bike like I drive, which is kind of like an old person. Oh, she's a great driver. Thank you. Yeah. So I think I'm improving on everything. You're not standing driver. Whereas when we first stated, who knew? I mean, not so great. But I have an understanding of the numbers. And you have thermonuclear watts. So I can't wait to see you do some bike racing. Oh, thank you. I'm excited. But I did sign up. I want to sign up for a running race too. Yeah. Which might feel, I mean, I literally like five weeks ago. If my parents are listening to this, they'll like wait a second. Yeah, yeah. What are you talking about? But it's kind of fun. I mean, I think the thing about like having to come back multiple times is there's always this like constant fire burning within inside you. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like when things are going like perfectly well for me. Oh, I have a baby and multiple jobs. Like, you know, I'm approaching like my mid 30s. I really need to be full sending this all the time. Yeah. And when it gets taken away from you all the time, you're like, yes. I do. I got this deep fire raging within me. And so it's kind of fun to capitalize on it. I love the perspective of our listeners right now because they get a check in once a week if they're just on the main podcast twice a week. If they subscribe to our Patreon and get our bonus podcast. And so they're just hearing a few weeks ago. Heart is fucked and all this. I'm going to be on the couch forever. This couch is like a permanent existence. Yeah. One of the things that makes you such a superstar is you've the shortest memory of all time. Of all time. Yeah. But it's why you're so great. Like, I imagine the reason you're so good at interval workouts is you've forgotten about the other interval after you're done the first one. It's like three seconds and you're on to the next one. Yeah, it's kind of fun. So I can't wait for it. And we have the best episode bringing all of this swole pumped out energy to you for you today. The first thing we're going to talk about is my big training weekend. It was just a little thing. Some follow up on Whistler and UTMB. Some really interesting data on that. A new study on strength training. Talk about the 50 mile American record, which went down this week. Diana and I add, subject of a new Netflix film that I think is a little more complicated than people are giving her the four. The soap opera of the Olympic trials in the US. Talk about retirement and trail running. Maybe talk about Red S. And then hot takes. We have like ten hot takes lined up. And I think we should do all of them. Yes. Some of them are actually quite long. Like some of them are like story based hot takes in their good. Well, I think that means we're going to miss the red S consensus statement. Yeah. That's kind of fine. You know, I do research on reds. Yeah. And I hot takes are pretty darn cool. Reds. Reds is important. Yeah. It's important to talk about. But I feel like we kind of spread. We spread the feeling love on here quite a bit. Just organically. Yeah, organically. But also we appreciate non organic food. GMOs are all about GMOs. Because that's what Fritos are. But I think it is interesting that your work is so heavily involved in reds. You know, you're so focused on this. And I think any time your work is involved in something really intensely, it's sometimes a little overwhelming. A good example. For sure. Yeah. Comedians generally do not listen to other comedians. It's just a little too much. And so maybe that's why we're kicking the red S can down the road a little bit. Well, I kind of like our life. Because we have we have all these different like chunks of what we do. We're almost like multi chunking what we do into several different areas. And it's nice because I had the reflection this morning like I think if I had to spend 100% of my time researching reds, I might start to go a little bit bananas. Yeah. By the end of it, bananas with peanut butter because that's what you need if you study reds. And it's kind of nice to have this like like much more expansive view through coaching and like building a business like swap and researching and training. So yeah, that's nice. Well, I love everything you're doing. Actually, in that conversation, we're going to talk about new study viewers eventually. But first, I want to give myself props because I did my biggest training weekend ever. You crushed it. Are you pumped out? Am I pumped out? No, actually. Not at all. Really? That's wild. I don't know why. Okay. You're training weekend. Yeah. 30 miles on Saturday. It's an ultramarathon within a training day. You've probably only done that. I mean, how many times do you think you've run that distance? Probably like 15 times total. Yeah. You just need a lot. We don't prescribe that much in training. Like as coaches, that's one of our big things with long runs. I almost never go over 50k for athletes in training. Sometimes we'll do back to bats. So I did 30 miles and then 18 miles prescribed by my coach Megan. And I'm not sure what's exactly what's happening in my body. But things are happening though. I think a couple things I might attribute it to. The first is I was really diligent with my protein intake. And the second is also related to food consumption. I was reflecting that I think my biggest skill as an athlete is being able to eat a metric crap ton of food. Like that is my best attribute. There was one rider in the professional biking peloton. I think it was ECMOV who competed for like 20 years. And everyone said he's the only guy that gains weight during the Tour de France. And that's why he had a long career. That's me. I can eat like a freaking horse. It's so helpful. And on the run too. I actually had this reflection because, okay, so you did this 30 mile long run. And we recently had a conversation. Like sometimes I feel like in family structure, it's really hard if one person goes out and does a 30 mile long run consistently on weekends. Because it's like you got that 30 mile long run. You got straight and straight and you get hot tub. You got fueling like all in one. And then we have an evolving family life too. But you came back from your 30 mile long run. And you like compress those activities together. And by like 1.30 p.m. you were ready to hang out with Leo. And I feel like a lot of that has to do with fueling actually. Yeah. Because it's like I've had the reflection yesterday on the bike when I did my 50 mile gravel ride. I fueled 20 minutes away from home, which is something I like typically wouldn't do. I took a 160 calorie gel 20 minutes away from home. Yeah. And the rest of the day my energy as a parent was so much better. So sure. And it's interesting how like Leo has made me reflect on that. It's like no, I can't sit on my couch all day. You know, I got a parent. Yeah, and that's what we talked about last week at the Carbohydrate Revolution. And I'm so glad you brought it up because this is it in an applied fashion. So on both runs this week, I was taking in about 400 calories per hour. And primarily from precision, but also from some other things. And it was amazing. So, you know, and maybe the biggest thing of all is mentally, I just was not broken down. My legs are not sore at all. And that's maybe the biggest transition I've made in my running career. I've always been really good at eating. Like that's something that I've progressed on as I've gotten older. But the fueling during runs sometimes to me almost feels like oh, well, I love eating so much that if I fuel on runs, is this taking away from my eating? Like overall, like will this mean that I order a single cheeseburger, as opposed to a double cheeseburger. And a medium fries and large fries. In fact, the opposite is true. That by fueling during activity, I've noticed that the fire just burns hotter. My resting metabolic rate goes up. And in fact, it just leads to more fuel being needed in the fire. It's the best positive feedback loop ever. Fueling leads to more fueling, leads to more fueling, which leads to fitness, which leads to not being sore, which leads to being a good parent. Which actually my other hypothesis of reflection is that as I was writing, I actually really looked forward to fueling because our fuel source is now. Like I feel like science has coalesced in making our fuel sources tastier. So it's kind of like the equivalent of having a cheeseburger on the bike and kind of look forward to it. It's so good. So precision hydration. Go to their website. It is so good. Use offer code swap at checkout for 15% off. And that's what I was using mostly this week. They make 90 gram of carbohydrate gels, like these big-ass gels that I just put in my waist pack. That's 360 calories. And one big gel makes this big fueling process pretty easy. It's like a double cheeseburger in a bag. Yeah. And actually it makes the chemistry in my brain feel exactly like that. Okay. But what are you turning for? I mean, I'm not just giving you a 30-mile-long run randomly that be kind of inappropriate as coach. What is, are you going to say it or? Yeah. Okay. I can say it now. Okay. This week in giving confidence. Great. I'm going to do the McDowell 50 mileer. So after my ankle went just fully collapsed at Grindstone. I wanted something to end the year by. And this is a really cool race. It's R of IPA, who is coming out with these initiatives that are pushing back against UTMB. As we're going to talk about in a minute. So I want to support this race organization. So I didn't even email asking for a comp. I just was like, all right. I'm going to pay this few hundred bucks to register for this 50 mile because I want to support them. So that's my goal. That's the best way to invest in yourself. And also, I love that you're doing this too. Because sometimes I feel like you struggle with, like, I don't know. Sometimes it's like, you're like, oh, well, you know, I have this plane trip to make. Yeah. And our family has to go there. And I think go all in. Go all in. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. And on this topic, like, you've been such a good model for this. But you know who else has been? Who? My dad. Yeah. And growing up, I remember him doing bike races when I was three years old. He would fly us across the country. Actually, never fly us. He would drive in our Ford economy line bank without air conditioning, which is pretty traumatic for me as a memory driving through Arizona without air conditioning. Maybe that's where your current hemoglobin status comes from. It's true. Yeah. So you just have like the epigenetics of all this amazing heat training. I was ahead of the process on heat training, but he would take us to these races and a thing that must have been kind of stressful for him as he was working a busy job and had all this other stuff going on. And he would, you know, show us what it meant to be vulnerable and put yourself out there and things. And so I'm trying to ground myself in that. And it's really freaking topical because my dad just went through something that I think reminds me a lot of you actually. And in fact, I think my dad and you share a lot of similarities. Is it kind of weird that I married my dad? I was just going to say it. I just said as I was saying that I was like, oh fuck. Okay, but here's the reverse thing. Yeah. Actually, no, I shouldn't say this. Well, I really love your dad because he reminds me of you. So maybe like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the transitive property. I'm just saying it like you. Well, I would say that I like me, but I feel awkward to say. So I'll say I like you instead. Yeah. And you kind of have eyebrows like him. That's true. So do you. Yeah. Leo is going to be fucked. Oh, he is so fucked. His eyebrows are going to be so pumped out. Okay, but this is actually a pretty interesting story, I think. And dad raised the Moab Trail half marathon, which was the US half champs as we talked about last week. And he was doing it because he's in his 70s and he's going for that age group podium. Even though he's at the bottom of the age group or like the kind of the top end of the age group right now. So he's waiting to age up to really be able to compete. And he finished third in his age group, which is huge. He gets on the podium and he's really proud of himself. And that night, he sent us a picture of his leg just completely no blood in it at all. It looked like a ghost. Like if a leg could be a ghost, this is it. Yeah. And we were just like, okay, that's a little scary. Megan, fortunately, being a doctor, it was like you got to go to the hospital immediately. He did long story short, he had a vascular constrictions throughout his legs. So blood clots and things. I don't know how he did the race. It was a weird event. And he had surgery after the race. And thankfully, everything's okay. We are really worried there for a bit. But the funniest part of all is I'm talking to my dad before his surgery after all this is identified. The doctor literally just said, yeah, you need to talk to your dad. And he was talking to Megan actually as a doctor to doctor. He's like, you need to talk to him about maybe not running again. The dad was just like, yeah, I'm going to go back to Moab next year. I'm going to win it. Well, actually, I was talking to the surgeon before this even happened. Yeah. One of my first questions to him was like, you know, athletics and running even in your dads, even in his 70s are part of his identity. Like, what is the outcome going to be for that? And the surgeon was like, I was hoping you wouldn't ask me that. But it does, it does look favorable that he'll return back, which is great. Yeah. But you know what I love about your dad. What? So immediately, like two hours after surgery, he's just coming out of like the post-op area. And he asked, so one of our friends Sasha was racing the New York City marathon. Yeah. Which was on surgery day. And one of the first texts that we get from your dad is, how did Sasha do it? Yeah. In classic dad fashion, he spelled her name wrong. Yeah. It's like all old people. They just can't text. But he's deeply caring. Yes. Yeah. So I wanted to say, dad, we love you. Maybe a little bit creepily about what we said. But what it makes me reflect on a little bit is one, your process with going to the couch because of these health issues and how you're bouncing back, you know. And seeing my dad go through this as you're going through what you're going through, kind of underscores for me that like, we need to keep pushing back against the dark night. Yeah. Like whatever our dark night is, whatever that, you know, inevitable inertia of collapse and failure is, whether it's imminent now or it's just aging or whatever, we need to push back against it. Because otherwise, where does purpose come from? And I, and both of you demonstrate that so much with your, like toughness and grit. Well, the interesting thing about the dark night is sometimes I feel like when it comes and reappears, you have these moments of like thinking really deeply about what matters. And for me, sometimes it's easier to push back against the dark night than it is to just like hang with no nights hanging out. Yeah. It's like my own self becomes the night in those cases. And so it's kind of, it's kind of an interesting reflection. But on the couch topic, we really need a new literal couch. Yeah. But it'll be amazing for those moments when you have to rest and adapt. We have one of those ones that like, our current couch has no like foot extension options. Yeah. We need to have full couch with like all the foot extender options. Help recovery. Yeah, exactly. If you tell me something will help your heart, I literally told you, as you went through your heart thing, it's like, right, Megan, we can use all of our life savings to get you to the best doctor possible, to get the procedures needed when I was like, right, you're going to die. So we can definitely spend some on a couch if that's going to help. Well, we're going to go couch to 50k a lot. We better have a damn good couch. Yes. And then the final reflection on my dad before we get to Whistler is, you know, this mindset that he has was embodied and how he coached me and all of the little sports teams we had growing up. He's like the definition of everything, the opposite of what we talked about last week with toxic types of coaching and ego-driven coaching. And that's where I draw so much inspiration. So if you've never seen the movie Whiplash, it's on Netflix right now. It's a major recommendation to reflect on some of these principles about how, you know, ego can be mistaken for brilliance in a lot of different fields. And that is truly fucked. And we need to make sure we don't do that. In fact, like the way to do it is be like my dad, be this loving source of light, who's sometimes a little bit delusional, but delusional and like the most supportive way possible. Yeah, Whiplash came out a couple of years ago. Actually, this is your second time watching it. I feel like whenever you go downstairs to watch movies on Netflix, it could be something like pitch perfect, actually, which is a great movie, but you go down there and because you're running during the movie, you come out with like all of these ideas. It's like the mind exploding emoji. It's on the treadmill. Because you're on the treadmill and running is such a great vehicle for thinking about these things. Yeah, and it's so great. I have so many reflections on that that I do not want to give spoilers for Whiplash other than to say, just watch it and then we'll have some spoilers about my feelings on the true message of that movie because you might be a little conflicted at the end based on what I'm talking about. But I'll save that for maybe a week or two. Instead of a book club, we have a Netflix movie club. Oh, that's perfect. That's amazing. Oh, but it's topical. Yeah. Get on your treadmill. Get on your treadmill sessions and watch them. Yeah. And it's like fitness gains and like mind psychology gains too. Exactly. Okay. Let's go into the Whistler U-T-N-B fall-up. We have a bunch of interesting info on this. Go back to episodes and listen to our breakdown of that. Megan, did you know that was one of our most listened to episodes ever? It got shared by a who's who within Germany. Apparently, we did a pretty good job breaking down the business implications. Okay. High five. That's exciting. Yeah. Also a little scary at the same time too. Yeah. But it's not surprising to me because I love controversy. I love controversy. And you know, it seems like other people do too. Also love business. That's true. And love thinking about this stuff. Yes. Even though it's not our area of expertise, we love thinking about other people talking about it, even though we won't go into podcasts to talk about it on our own. That's actually a good point. We also love controversy, but don't love them boiling ourselves in it. And boiling ourselves in it. Exactly. And that is a little bit of a hidden message for some fans out there that like Easter eggs. Okay. So what happened here? Um, after the whole bruja, uh-huh, where UTMB, um, this big international organization, um, comes in and puts a race down right in Whistler, Canada, where dairy robins, CMTR, or race organization, had the Whistler Alpine Meadows race. They had announced their cancellation. UTMB said in their response that came out two weeks later, look, we just waited until after this cancellation announcement happened. And that's when we came in and started talking to the stakeholders. We were perfectly innocent in this whole process. It really felt like a letter that was written by ChatGPT. Okay. That was my first impression too. Yeah. Okay, Grenadette, it was a good, it was ChatGPT4 and not 3.5. Yeah, yeah, it was good. It was a good, uh, AI, but it was definitely AI. It did not have any personal touch. Well, that being said, it's probably ChatGPT by UTMB. At this point, they're just like soaking up all the local races. And next, they're coming for all the AI. You better watch out. Well, open AI, the company that makes ChatGPT is valued at like $100 billion. Yeah. Somehow UTMB got all that money. That's how big, why the race fees are so much. That's why they charge $500. They want to buy Microsoft. Where did it come from? $400 race fees. In fact, I think they're quite more than that in some instances. Are they really? At some races. Okay, that's a heck of an investment though. Yeah. Can you imagine paying more than that to race? You better have a darn good race. Exactly. Okay, so the timeline, as they stated it in their letter, which they just posted was, the race was canceled in February, the Whistler Alpine Meadows race. The first conversations that UTMB had with the Whistler ski area were in June. And then here's the money quote, I think, in the entire little letter they put out. In retrospect, we should have kept the lines of communication open between us and CMTR to inform them. As a courtesy, as a courtesy of our conversations, perhaps this was made of difference. We will never know whether the outcome of the partnership announcement would have been different. But we could have and should have been better here. Wow, Chatchy BT really understands the counterfactual. They're like, we don't know, but perhaps there's also like eight commas when there doesn't need to be. I feel like whoever is saying that is kind of like stuttering through an apology. Right, exactly. Or there's so many, like Chatchy BT is going full lawyer mode. And it's like, let's add perhaps to every single clause of a sentence and a million commas associated with it. And what we said initially was that, you know, never ascribed to Malice, what could appropriately be explained by ignorance, the old Hamlin's law. And I think what they said is ignorance it is. Well, I mean, I don't think we'll ever know that. Like I feel like it to some extent, it's easier to say this is ignorance than malice because if you say this is malice, it's like, oh, well, that looks especially bad. Whereas ignorance looks bad, but not quite as bad. So I feel like it's a lot easier to plead ignorance and malice. And just looking at this, it gives me such a bad taste in my mouth that as a courtesy clause they put in. So like we could have communicated with the local trail community as a courtesy. But we were going to do it anyways. Yeah. But in the point being that the trail community is what gives you the power here. You should be communicating with every trail community you're putting down roots in just as a way to get stakeholder investment. It's from a business strategy point of view. And the way they doubled down on the entire process really disappointed me. Because they essentially did to me like a playbook of PR that was totally disingenuous. I mean, what do you think about that? I'm seeing that this is a very disingenuous process because they just wait a couple weeks. They don't admit to any wrongdoing really. They just said they should have been better and say we're going to continue as normal. Come spend all these hundreds of dollars to support our race. No, I totally agree. I think they should have won come out right and apologize a lot sooner. Then I also think they have to take action and do something. It can't just be this apology pleading ignorance. Yeah. What is your thought? Okay, so say your UTMB in this situation. How do you handle it from, and these can be separate examples. Yeah. How do you handle it from like a business perspective versus a moral perspective? And are those one and the same? Okay, so as a business perspective, I think they're making the right bet. And that's actually what I was going to say too. Yeah. So I'm going to say to the CEO of UTMB, I might do the exact same thing. Maybe with six more commas. Yeah. Six more commas. I mean, I get a little anxious whenever these things happen. I'd be like, we need it. We need a few more perhaps isn't here. We need to see what happens. And that's why you wouldn't be the CEO of UTMB. Exactly. You're a boss bitch, but you don't have the, the bitch isn't quite enough. You know what? I'm a boss bitch with high anxiety at midnight. And yeah, I would need, I would need some like, yeah, some more of this be here. But what would you do from like a moral perspective? Well, on the business thing. You know, I think that it is from the PR handbook in the sense that they waited for the immediate controversy to die down. They released this open letter, which essentially gives them some way to shield themselves from accountability without having to make any changes. And now they hope that the internet just rolls. You know, because the thing with modern era is everything happens so fast that how can you even keep track of this? And so, you know, what we have to do as tro runners, if this is important to us and we don't think they should be able to just step in and do this without stakeholder involvement. When there's a beloved race there, then I think we just need to make sure the internet doesn't roll over it. That this is remembered and that this race in my opinion is not supported. And I'm pretty strong on that. I mean, we haven't actually haven't talked about it yet. Do you think we as swap should support this race in any fashion? The Whistler race or like the broader you team? Just Whistler. Oh, for sure not. Okay, you're on board with that. Yeah, I'm aware of that. I think I'm still, so I think this apology is not sufficient obviously in my mind. And I think I'm still a little bit mixed on like broader U-T-N-V races. Yeah. And especially like the U-T-N-V final like what's going to happen come time to be in chamony. And I'm still mixed on that. Well, I see that's where I'm a little different. Yeah. I'm fine with the series. Like I still think the broader implications of U-T-N-V coming into the sport will be good for the tro runners that are not yet tro running. The 20 years from now tro runners that will have more opportunities, a bigger platform. And you know, all of this stuff that grows around what U-T-N-V is doing generally. Well, I was actually going to say that is I feel like U-T-N-V growing gives competitors room to grow around. Like it's almost like if U-T-N-V has more of a market share in their fucking up, there's a greater potential for competitors to come in and soak up some of that. Like if the denominator is bigger, there's more room to grab. To a certain point. To a certain point. But as we talked about before, rising tide raises all boats. Unless you crush the fucking boats by putting your boat right on top of it. Unless you have a yacht. Yeah, exactly. And so with that in mind, I think the lesson U-T-N-V needs to learn is that this race cannot be successful. And I don't know whether the international framework of it will change it because like a lot of people might come from overseas. But if you're listening to this, like we strongly, strongly recommend you don't do this race. We're not going to support it as coaches or in podcasts. Unless Gary Robbins comes out and says that there's a different arrangement, something else happens beyond this. Like this is the state of play. We're still giving U-T-N-V though room to grow if they change their approach to it. If they partner with Gary or if anything happens here, we're open to our changing our minds. But as of now, we can't let this type of behavior stand because you're essentially taking away any deterrence. Like it's exactly like the financial regulation, let's say. The whole point of punishing people that commit financial crimes is not necessarily to punish them for their wrongdoing all the time. It's to make sure the next person has deterrence. And so we need to make sure there's some deterrence here for U-T-N-V that their news. There's some accountability, aside from Instagram comments, because Instagram comments, unfortunately, don't do shit unless they come with action. Well, I love that analogy actually to the financial world. It's like Martha Stewart sitting in jail doing her crafts in like a very beautiful area. No, it's kind of fuck that Martha Stewart got busted for insider trading. The more I've read about that. Oh, interesting. It's the classic, like, why does a woman on like a smaller stakes thing be the one that gets busted for this when there's all of these executives that sat through the financial crisis and twiddled their thumbs around evil that they knew with their financial literacy was evil. But Martha Stewart, it's the one that goes to jail. It's a good point. I bet you she was way more financially literate than you're giving her credit for. No, she's a freaking beast. Oh, I was just saying she's brilliant. I've listened to her on a number of podcasts. I'm a big Martha Stewart stand ever here. I've never talked about this. I'm in the Martha Stewart. Okay. How have we never talked about this? I am too. But you know, it's just I love her crafts. I love arts and crafts. 10 copies of her size swimsuit. That's where we differ. I'm crocheting. You're looking at swimsuit. Yeah. But no, it's actually an interesting thing. Like the U.T.M.B. is not Martha Stewart. U.T.M.B. is a financial executive. Yes. Yeah. At, I don't know, Bear Stearns, let's say something like that. Okay. But you never answered the second question. What would you do if you were U.T.M.B. And you had like more of a moral compass guiding you in terms of this decision? I mean, I think that all you can really do in those instances when you fuck up is apologize. And instead of just saying we should have been better here, you do something better. You take action. Exactly. Yes. And I don't know exactly what that looks like. It might just be like an initiative that maybe something like they reach out to local communities and turn this race into a profit generator into something that uplifts neutral owners into the sport and has like 200 free spots for, you know, BIPOC athletes. I don't know exactly. Or you give like 5% of your proceeds to local race directors. Yeah. And then you buy them later. It's going to be perfect. That's a way, you know what we call that in my business, Megan? What? Money laundering. Okay. But interestingly, I think the way this has been framed and this is the next big piece of news is David versus Goliath. Right? On one side of David, CMTR and local race organizations versus Goliath, UTMB, this big motherfucker that wants to kill all these little David's. And we're thinking, well, David can win. And the point being, it's not David versus Goliath. We don't need to rely on some mythical win for this to happen. There's another Goliath here. And that's the combined power of everyone. Essentially, Goliath versus 5,000 David's. And what we're starting to see is an announcement that just came out today on the day of recording. We're recording this on Monday, which is essentially a new ultra trail world tour called World Trail Trail majors. Consisting of nine races around the globe that have not partnered with UTMB. Everything from Black Canyon 100K in the United States to Hong Kong 100K, Quebec mega trail. A bunch of really famous races. And they're essentially saying, look, we're independent. We're trying to support diversity in the sport. And we're coming at you, UTMB. And I love this. And my controversy brain loves it too. I'm like, over here, swarrow in the controversy feeling it. But they're actually not. So unlike UTMB, they're not having all of these races coalesce into a final. So these races are independent entities. And there's a point system. And then there'll be actually a price verse. I'll be curious to see, like, I think if they have a pretty large financial incentive, I'll be curious to see how that drives. Like, I feel like it would be hard to do, like, I wish you could probably easily do both. But I'll be curious to see how that drives professional athletes into this world major approach. And I think it's a great thing. You know, like the two world trail majors, UTMB, Golden Trail series, Cirque series here in the US, things like that. We're starting to have a lot of different options. And that's essentially all we need here is the type of competition that makes it possible to do things like small-scale boycats and not totally ostracize yourself and future generations from the sport. So more competition is good. World trail majors is going to be something we focus on. We haven't talked about this, but I also think every single one of these races, we should do a little special recap for. Oh, that would be fun. And just as a way for us to really support it. And still talk about the UTMB when it's relevant. But also, never talk about UTMB without also shitting on their decisions a little bit unless they start to make some changes. Do you think this is all different? And this is actually getting to a hot take that we have had talking about how the idea that, like, running is primarily a participator sport as opposed to a spectator sport. Unlike so many sports out there, like football. Like, we love watching football, but I would be pumped as shit if I went and played football right now. Like every ounce of my body would be sore. I would be destroyed. Like, we're not playing football in our history. Yeah, you would probably actually, I saw a great tweet actually that was a question. And would you accept $1 million right now? Or option two, $10 million if you had 10 carries to get one yard in the NFL? Oh, my gosh. Just one yard is all you need. Well, I really value my brain. Yeah. Yeah. I would honestly go, I'd probably honestly go $1 million. Oh, of a thousand. And my neck. And we're going to go all the way down the chain, torque rack. I mean, who says the $10 million does not understand professional athletes? Or CT? Yeah. Oh, no, no. It's scary. Yeah. Literally dying. Oh, yeah. If I was hit by any linebacker in the NFL, I would disintegrate. And you used to be a football player. There's 206 bones in the human body, right? I would have exactly one bone. Or zero bones. I'll be fused. Whatever you want to call. Whether they would be outside the body. It would just be a pile of David's. I'm not sure if it would be fusion or fission. But it would be one of those nuclear reactions. And it would not be very good. So, yeah, when it comes to spectators or participants, what are you thinking? Do you think the considerations are different? Because I feel like, like, if you think, well, I guess the better way to phrase it is, like, do you think for professional athletes who are driving the spectating or for participants, who are, in some sense, following the professional athletes? Do you think it's a different equation? These questions about, do you compete in U-T-M-B? And like, how does this look like? Great question. Very interesting in 100% true. Yeah. So, in the NFL, us as individuals really have no power. Right? So, like, you can disagree with some of the ways the NFL does things. And at the end of the day, they're just going to keep doing what they're doing. As a fan of the Washington commanders growing up, you saw this in Dan Snyder, their owner, who's a piece of shit, everybody hated him. But at the end of the day, there wasn't really anything you can do. Because what is going to happen when all the owners are standing by him? Just, there's really no power. Whereas in a participant's sport, all of us basically have equal power to put influence, especially when big names like us, perhaps, will... We're like medium names. I mean, the podcast is a big name. Okay, that's true. Even if we're not big names. You know what I mean by that? Yeah. Like, the point is the podcast is a huge platform, one of the biggest in running. And every single participant that can glomp on to, like, a message, like, that has massive power. Like, the NFL doesn't give a shit. Which is really cool, actually. Because I feel like as anyone who participates in running and does a race, you carry power in that decision. And I think it's such a cool distinction between, like, a sport that's primarily driven by spectators versus a sport that's driven by participants. And running is so unique in that sense. It's so unique. And it's so exciting. I can't wait to see where it goes from here. It'll be a great business story. All right, let's go on to a new study before we get into a ton of great news. We can't wait to tell you all of the fun things you want to talk about. This is on strength in muscle fiber typology in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The title is, the impact of lifelong strength versus endurance training on muscle type morphology and phenotype composition in older men. And this, I feel like the study is looking at older men. But I feel like it carries a lot of, like, justification for how we think about strength training across many different ages and across gender, too. And I think it'll be a great opportunity for us to talk about strength training and how it's a little more nuanced. Because sometimes some of our listeners hear what we say with minimal dose strength training. And the types of strength routines we put online and say, Hey, you see an, I can't deadlift. I can't bench 800 pounds. It's like, no, that's not what we're saying. We're saying it's a little more nuanced. And you need to understand why you're doing what you're doing. The point isn't just to move heavy things. But sometimes moving heavy things can be helpful as the study points out. I was actually just about to say, sometimes it's going to be really fun, too. There's great, like, I don't know for you. What are you talking about? Okay, sometimes, like, back in the day, when I see a lot of heavy lifting as I get a hockey player, I would get so much joy at a bench pressing. I was going to say really heavy stuff, but it was like pretty light stuff. Yeah. But by my equation, it was heavy. I bench press pretty heavy stuff. And in retrospect, I was just full in myself the whole time. You were just fucking around with your muscle fiber typology. Yeah, exactly. And that's the crux of the study. Yeah, so let's get right into it and then we'll talk about how that's relevant. Before I give anecdotes about my football history. Just how much protein I have in those days. Okay, so there were four groups in the study. There was an over 70 group that did strength training for their lives. An over 70 endurance group that was more focused on things like running. Over 70 controls, just background activity activity. And then under 30-year-old controls, which are just a way to determine to baseline human physiology. And when I saw this breakdown of age and cohort, it actually made me relieved because when I saw older men in a title, I was like, no, I'm feeling my age. As I go couch to 50k and I was like, it's going to be the over 35 group. Isn't it? We're like rapidly getting there. Well, it's like in Europe, don't they call it over 35 masters or in cycling? Yes. 35 plus is masters. And I'm like, is I'm a master's athlete and a bike? No, I know as in a wild. No, your physiology is just dreaming and believing and getting started. I'm convinced that if I do health strides and have protein, I'm never going to age. You're going to be, yeah, you're going to be in the regular cohort forever. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to be like Martha Stewart. I'm going to get a legacy. crocheting and living your best life. Okay, but what they did is they did five different measurements across these four groups. The first three were in a vastest lateralis biopsy, so doing a muscle biopsy to understand muscle fiber composition and distribution. So they looked at and compared fiber type, fiber type grouping. And then the prevalent, the prevalence of atrophic myofibers. So atrophic myofibers are fibers that have lost their muscle and strength over time. And so obviously you don't want those. And then the final two measurements were strength measurements of a leg press max, as well as the rate of forced development that you could do in leg press. What I love about this study is they just went straight in with a knife and they're like, we're taking muscle outs. Oh, yeah. That's what so many people do. It must be really, you can learn a lot. I love muscle biopsy studies in general. And this is one of the complicated things on training theory is that muscle biopsy studies are pretty rare. Especially in like elite athletes. It's super rare. I mean, super rare. When it comes to like, you know, you're not going to get Jacob Bingerbritzen to do a muscle fiber biopsy for no reason in your lab study. That's why we use things like lactate. And we end up approximating muscle fiber typology. So in typology, what we're saying here, essentially fast twitch or slow twitch, fast twitch type two muscle fibers slow twitch type one. There's also intermediate fibers, which are a type of type two fibers. And that just has such a massive influence on training theory is where someone stands in the muscle fiber typology at baseline. But we almost never measure it because like an average athlete is not going to go in and get a muscle fiber biopsy. It's not something we recommend. And they started they've started to have some ways to approximate it from the outside and like your calf muscles and stuff. But that's it's like karnasine measurements. But it's still not 100% accurate. So we're kind of in this weird place in exercise physiology where we're trying to measure intervention on humans. When in reality, there's bunches of difference of subgroups of humans based on their muscle fiber typology alone that have different responses. And some of the other limitations of muscle fiber typology too is you're only usually looking at one muscle. Like you're not going to go in and biopsy six different muscles typically within a study because it's like that's really invasive. But how someone uses their vastest lateralis and how someone uses a different muscle in their body might be different. Like for me, I feel like I'm a master compensator. Like you asked me to do an exercise. And I'm probably engaging a different muscle to get there, which is which is not great. But I'm sure that in this like I don't know my muscle fiber typology might be different doing an exercise where I'm compensating. Yeah, definitely all of this stuff can vary a little bit, but the overall approach of it is truly fascinating to develop some theories. And here are the findings. The strength group. So the over 70 strength group had similar type two fiber distribution. So fast switch fiber distribution strength and forced development as the young controls. Meanwhile, the endurance group had let fewer type two fibers and more atrophic fibers, so smaller little fibers. And the reason that's significant is essentially what we're saying is by doing strength through your seventies, you're able to be comparable to the under 30 controls. Meanwhile, the endurance group did not have the same changes. That's pretty relevant. And I think the broad takeaway is as you age, you need to do strength work. And I have conversations about this with athletes, anyone any athlete over 40. It's like we really need to pump the strength work. And it's not just like looking at muscle fiber type composition and distribution. We're talking hormones. Yeah. We're talking thinking about building bone mental density. We're talking about like broader implications for performance that aren't necessarily being seen in a muscle biopsy. And I think it becomes really important or age 40. But that being said, when I look at this and thinking about like seeing this type two muscle fiber distribution in older athletes. If we're doing a lot of strength as younger athletes, we might not want to get those. I mean, we certainly don't want to get those type two muscle fibers, which are fast switch. And so it also kind of makes me like head into our bias of mental and a strength training for younger athletes. And I think it gets to why it so nuanced. That's the big idea. So for me, back to my history, clearly I was a type two heavy, mostly intermediate fiber athlete. So mostly fast switch athlete based on my sprint times, my lifting times, all of that. Every year I get better endurance because I'm becoming a little bit type less type two dominant. The reason we've always said it's good to age is because of the same thing they're finding in this study. That you're becoming a little bit less type two. But after a point, that becomes a bad thing because you start to get, you know, atrophic muscle fibers, not just becoming more type one dominant. Those are muscle fibers on the couch. So you can see the like implications here. It's like if I did the types of very heavy lifting that some of our listeners will will message me and say I should do. There is no way I wouldn't be cramping at my 15 of a race because I'd go back to being a fast switch boy. Meanwhile, athletes that are very type one dominant. So a lot of your Olympians, let's say in the endurance. Well, of course they can lift incredibly heavy because they don't really have type two muscle fibers to worry about because the ones that they do strengthen from that will just make them better at running as they fatigue. So that's where it gets complicated on the individual response rate. And I think the nuance is it's not not lifting versus lifting. We're huge proponents of lifting. We're just saying like you don't need to do power lifts even as you age a lot. So instead of all that, here's my suggestion. Get a heavy kettlebell. Even if you're unsure how you're going to use it, order one right now. You can start at like 20 pounds, but I would suggest get a 20 pounder and like a 40 pounder. And then figure out what to do with them after they arrive at your house. I love that. And get them Amazon delivered. Yeah. It's pretty bad for the environment, but do it because it's the easiest way to get a kettlebell. And you're making the Amazon driver stronger. That's true. Actually, they're not allowed to stop for pea breaks and now we're getting stronger type two muscle fibers. But once you have those kettlebells doing things like goblet squats, like split squats. And basically just, and then your mountain legs with them, you are loading your muscles plenty. Like a lot of those exercises, you will not be able to do more than five to 10 reps of. And then you're starting to get into all of these benefits, but without the really heavy loading, that can come with things like injury risk and risking just tons of type two muscle fiber recruitment, which might not be productive, especially for young athletes. Okay. How do you have a conversation? What do you think comes to you? And they've been, they're really like lifting heavy stuff brings them joy. This is something that they've done, but they have a ton of like aerobic development and talent. How do you talk to them as a coach? And how do you find like a common, do you, do you even find a common ground? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think basically if someone wants to squat 600 pounds, but maybe it's not 600 pounds. Maybe it's like 150 pounds and they have found a strength training plan that's like reasonable for them. How do you mix that in and how do you get that? I always support strength work that people do when they reach out. As long as I'm not seeing obvious manifestations of its negative consequences, things like cramping, reduced endurance. I think fatigue resistance actually is one area. So if an athlete is really finding that they're fading at the end of long runs, like let's investigate this, especially races too, and see if like, you know, perhaps muscle fiber composition is playing a role in this. Definitely. And that's where it gets complicated. So in general, the strength work we put online, we stand by it, but maybe add a little bit heavier kettlebell as you progress and then as you age especially. So like for all of our athletes listening better over 40. But even in your mid 30s, once you start to become a geriatric like me over here, start to up the weight a little bit. Challenge your body in the twice weekly strength work that the types of things that we talk about. Hold a 40 pound weight when you're doing step ups. And you'll start to be like, oh, shit, this is strength. This is the type of thing that will probably prevent the the atrophy that happens over time. And, you know, we'll keep us young, essentially. Like a lot of what we talk about in this podcast is this is trying to design frameworks that allow 40, 50 plus year old athletes to have the same benefits of their strength that they have when they're young. But with improved endurance because aging does bring better endurance. I'm probably improved longevity too. Yeah. And let's like, and I feel like in this case, the two go hand in hand, which I find really cool. Okay, 10, 12 questions for you. Okay. And okay. So say you're given a 12 week training period and you can do whatever you want in that 12 week training period. And we go back to the thing that we're just talking about of you get $1 million. Or you get $10 million to do multiple plays in the NFL for a one yard carry. Okay. But you're given 12 weeks to train for it. Oh, 12 weeks to train for the NFL. No, still not. You still want it. No, no, no. I mean, you're a fast switch boy. But Megan, those got into what I would do. They're so big. Yeah. I would try to do like with the Hollywood actors do where, you know, Christian Bale will like gain 65 pounds in like a month or something. I tried to do that. I was trying to just get as big as possible. Because I cannot emphasize to you enough how big and fast pro athletes are. It is truly mind-blowing. If you saw it in person, you would never select option two. Like no one listening would basically unless you're actively coming from college football right now. And it's actually an interesting reflection on running too. Kind of gets back to my really spicy controversial take on big backyard. Yeah. That people really didn't appreciate, which I thought was funny. And I'm like, well, the whole point I'm trying to make is that at the top end of all professional sports, it is bonkers. Oh, it's ridiculous. Yeah. And like, it's important just this context to keep as we, you know, decide like celebrations of things like rankings and stuff. Well, I feel like every commentator in like the NFL should be should go in for one play. And he would happen to give them a broader understanding and much like our podcast. We have raised some of the very best in the world. Yeah. And it's like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had Jim Wumsley spanked me to yesterday. I literally went back in time. I transcended time and space after getting my ass kicked by Jim Wumsley in 2016. Haven't raised him since, which is good because I would go back to being a baby. I just be cool and calm down here. Okay. Let's go on to a bunch of different interesting stories that we wanted to chat about. The very first one is that Charlie Lawrence just set the 50 mile American record. I think it was 448, 4 hours, 48 minutes of 5 minute, 43 second per mile pace, which is bonkers. And also, it's a great transition because he just got, you got it from Jim Wumsley by two minutes. Yeah. Beating Jim Wumsley incredibly impressive. That's cool. But Jim Wumsley's record, a little bit different context that we think is important to point out. Jim was doing it in, I think Project Carbon X or something. It was when Hoka first released that big carbon shoe that they had. And having run in both the Carbon X and the modern super shoes that Nike makes. That was worth a little bit more than two minutes. I promise you. Oh, for sure. That was one of the worst carbon shoes of all time. Yeah. And then we love, I mean, I love Hoka's vegan ebos. And so I really uplift what the brand was doing. But you went into their mock ex now. Yeah. And the Tecton. I'm all about being a Hoka boy. But their Carbon X original shoe. I feel like the only thing that it would be really useful for is if your water skis came off and you still needed a ski. Oh, it would be useful for like hanging out in the couch. Yes. Just sit in there and hanging out. But actually, I'd be curious. We've been like shooting on like the original versions of the mock for a long time. Okay. You have a hundred K. Would you rather wear the original mock or the Carbon X? Oh, Carbon X. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it's still better than like a normal just chill shoe. It's just nowhere near some of the more recent shoes. But, you know, Charlie, probably if he was racing in that event, would have gone even faster because he would have had Pacers and more people pushing him. I think it's a truly impressive performance and, you know, shows that he's going to be a star. He's already a star. But two brings up some interesting ideas about road running versus ultra running. So Charlie lives out here in Boulder. We actually met him randomly up on Magnolia Road a few years ago. He was like the nicest guy in the world. That's a great guy. And ever since then, we've been following him and like cheering him on wholeheartedly. Because I mean, well, first of all, his like endurance talent is very clear and very obvious. But he just was so nice. Like something about it made me want to cheer for him. Yeah, so kind. He's had some ups and downs on the roads. He's done really well, but clearly not up to maybe his capabilities. And so he did this essentially off of a marathon build. Like he's just doing road marathon training. And then comes and sets the 50 mile record. And I think it does point out a little bit of what Swap has been trying to say for a long time now, which is these long altruists, when you don't have hills, are just marathons extended. Oh, yeah. It would be so fun to take like Shilling Flanagan and Des and just like pop a bunch of our US marathon runners. Molly Sidel would be amazing. Yes. That's the 50k record. Yeah. And I know that's controversial. Some coaches out there strongly disagree with this. And I'm like, you just don't understand again, how good these athletes are. Like if we put Kipchoga into a flat 100 mileer and had him care, it would be game over. Well, actually, that was my question though. Is do you think, to me, 50 miles is still within the realm of like a fast marathoner could do this without like a huge chunk of training? Do you think that's fundamentally different than the 100 mile event? Where like fueling and like, you know, fatigue resistance and legs breaking down. It's probably much higher like muscle breakdown in that context. Do you think it's different? Are we talking flat ground? Yeah. Not different. Yeah. Because there are some different variables, right? Especially fueling. Yes. But that's already a part of elite marathon performance anyway. Yeah, it's going to say, especially given the food-doping era that we're in. Like to perform on a marathon, you have to be there anyways. Yeah. And all the elite marathoners do essentially at the very, very, very top end. We're talking chogate types now. Is they bring their velocity at lactate threshold and their velocity at aerobic threshold and create them just right smack dab together. And so that their like aerobic paces are basically as fast as can be. And so the hunter mileer, as we always talked about, is just a little bit easier than your velocity at aerobic threshold. So these athletes will be able to go out and burn, you know, very little glycogen at insanely fast paces. So there's no reason that one of the best marathoners wouldn't just rock a 100 mile flat race. Maybe once you get over 100 miles, you start to talk about like, do they even give a shit? But what's wild is, you know, I think sometimes we're like, oh, 100 miles. This takes a really long time. It would probably take chogate 10 hours in a half, 10 and a half hours. So it's not, it's long, but it's not like so long that you're like, oh, he needs to think about sleep strategy or something. How long do you think it would take Molly's idol to run 100 mile? I mean, really fast. I don't want to, you know, the thing is, I don't want to, you know, honestly say that they're better than everybody else. I think it's complicated. I think Kip Chogate is a little different story because he's Kip Chogate. You know, he's like two hour marathoner. I think once you get to that, it's a little different. Like if we got the two 11, like, Asepha, that would be a little bit different story as well. So I think it's complicated. But I do think that it points out that for every athlete out there, even when you're training for Ultras, it comes down to speed. You know, it's not about going out and doing really long runs. I mean, I did those really long runs this week because I have a lot of fast twitch muscle fibers. I need to really break them down a little to be ready to go. But for most athletes, if you're at really good 10k fitness, that'll set you up really well for marathon. And if you're really good at marathon type fitness for you, as long as you're used to the specific terrain, you'll probably be ready for the Ultras. Well, this is why I love trails is because I feel like the correlation between the road marathon and a 50k road, a 50 mile road ultra or a 100 mile road road ultra is like really, really high. But I feel like when you look at the correlation structure of a road marathon and a 50 mile trail race or 100 mile trail race, it starts to break, I mean, it's still like one of the strongest variables. And that's why we focus on speed. But it starts to break down in a way that I really enjoy because there's so many other variables in the mix. And I think that's the beauty of trails is that like, not every Molly side, all the Molly side, I would probably be amazing at Western states, which is done speed goat. Not every Molly side, all Desland and Shaline Flanagan is going to be great on trails. And that's why I love trails. Yeah, trails are totally different. So if we start putting big up hills and down hills and the stuff, all bets are off. You don't know who's going to be successful. It depends on specific training. You know, some studies have pointed out that velocity at VO2 max so like speed is still the most highly predicted variable. But it's not that predictive. Yes, because it breaks, it starts to break down. Yeah, especially the more technical than terrain too. I imagine that starts like rapidly plummeting. Yeah, and it's so it's a totally different story. I don't think the narrative of this is not, you know, oh, any road runner could come to trails and dominate. It's, in fact, the opposite. It's that the reason we don't see road runners just come to trails and dominate is that it's really tough. You know, the sport can be so much different when it's not, you know, metronomic on a road or track. So I can't wait to see Charlie attack some, hopefully, of the more vertastic races. And I think he's going to do great because he clearly hasn't seen town at this stuff. Like I've been following him for a long time. And from the very beginning, I'm like, holy crap. I hope he comes to trails. I'm, I hope so too. And I hope he goes for the 100 mile road record in the process. That would be sweet. It's going to be so fun. I can't wait to see what happens next. Okay. A quick little story here that's also on a Netflix movie on Diana Niyad, a famous long distance swimmer. Um, we haven't seen the movie actually, but there's a reason we haven't seen the movie. And it's some skepticism that's out there about whether any of it's true. I was going to say, do you want to see the movie at this point? I don't. I don't either. Yeah, I feel like I struggle. So the skepticism is basically, it seems like her entire career, she has gone on and done some impressive line. Yeah. I actually saw, I saw a quote actually at the point was like, she doesn't ever tell the same lie twice. Yeah. Which is pretty impressive at that point. You just start stacking like she could be an incredible storyteller. Yeah. Like, imagine how good she'd be at fiction at this point in her lying career. Well, it's like a son of a nosh. If you don't need to be anchored in the truth, you can tell some great stories. Oh, yes. You can have a great memoir. Yeah. Um, so what's fascinating is the Netflix movie is called a remarkable true story of Niyad's Cuba crossing. So Cuba to far to swim. But I have broader skepticism on this. This is from a de facto article, which is a website I mentioned last week. You should all subscribe to it. It's a great Christmas gift for anyone you like. Love that love sports. You just gave it to me as a gift this. I did. So I wanted to read the day in a Niyad article. It looked amazing. I love the writing. And I was kind of lamenting. I was like, can you just send like download the article on a PDF and send it to me? And you gifted me de facto and I'm so pumped. It's so good. And what really, um, you know, struck home with me is the story of herself at the 1960 Olympic trials where the story has changed like a hundred times. Yes. She can't tell the same lie. Yeah. And it's gotten more and more outrageous. And it's even questionable whether any of it is true in that setting. And any of us that have met a person like this. You have doubts then, right? Because I'm not saying it's a pathological. I always have some psychological implications that I don't want to step into. But when there's smoke, there's fire with constant lying. And it's kind of wild that Netflix top movie right now is based on someone that the open water swimming community has just extreme skepticism about. Like extreme skepticism. And I'm actually confused. Like as Netflix, why would you publish this story as true knowing the amount of extreme skepticism that exists? I mean, within one Google search, you're like, you're starting to put the pieces together. Yeah, I know. None of this. None of this makes sense. I know about this for a long time. Is that cash money, baby? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting actually from like a perspective on labor and economics because essentially what it sounds like with Netflix is when the strikes happened with the writers and the actors, Netflix has all of this content, including overseas content. So they're just like, all right, we don't have to pay a labor. And we can just get a lot of things going. Whereas all of the other linear models were kind of fucked by it. So Netflix is laughing all the way the bank, which is probably how they're doing things like this. There's like, well, it's a trip to the bank. And so what I'm curious about here is thinking about the narratives that we tell in sports. And that things have to be the most inspirational, incredible, unbelievable things of all time to deserve our attention. And what types of incentives that creates, because it makes me feel a little bit skeptical about everything, when this unbelievable story, I think, is truly unbelievable. Well, I love, there's a quote in the vector. So you know, the Netflix is called like the remarkable true story. And there's a quote that any true story from Nihat is remarkable, which I thought was like a great comeback to that. Yeah, so we don't know what to be clear on that. Oh, yeah, actually, yeah. We have no inner workings to this. And the lawyer's listening. We don't know anything. Actually, I did ask Chatchy BT. Yeah, I was curious what Chatchy BT's take was. And it gave a very definitive state that none of what Nihat was saying was true. Well, I mean, Chatchy BT has bias. Yes. And who knows exactly why it was doing. Who knows what it's pulling from? Yes. But I was interested in that. But I guess my question is, I think this is like, like, if everything in sport that becomes captured at the highest level. Yeah. Is like, are these like sensational stories? Someone's like, UTMB. It's like Nihat is UTMB and sweeping up all the coverage within like marathon swimming. How do you uplift, like, the local races? How do you uplift the people that are just doing these like true remarkable things? I don't know. I have no idea. I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah. All I know is we need to be aware of, like, not celebrating people that lie. Yeah. Because the only thing that prevents us from lying is the social contract. That's true. And that goes for our politicians. It goes for our partners. Literally everything. And so this thing to me is like one of those little things that seems to mean nothing, but is just a slight erosion of the social fabric. Yes. And we start to see across society that makes people I think feel really unmoored. Yeah. And so that is my kind of morbid take on all of this is that it's not just an Netflix movie. This is why everyone can lie about everything and get away with it nowadays. And that's where I have a little bit of a problem. Well, I have a problem with it. I mean, I don't have a problem with this, but it's like sometimes every so often in life, I've come across a situation like this where we're interacting with someone. Yeah. And you start to follow the fact patterns and you're like, wait a second. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is just like a cycle. Some of it is a psychological issue. Yeah. And she and I've been realize she's doing it at this point. Totally right. And this is also could just be the full lived experience in her head. Or we could be it could be true. It could be true. Yeah, exactly. It could be true. Yeah. It could be true. But how do I like I'm like glitching like a Westworld by? Yeah. It's not true. But I guess my point is it's like I've come across these people in life. And it's like I want to support them and uplift them and also uplift. I mean, whatever narrative that's going on in their head is very real and very concrete. And it's like, how do you how do you work with that? I don't have a good answer for it. Well, you don't tell delusional people. They're delusional. Yeah. Yeah. And now you think, you know, she's probably a good person based on the people I've met like this are often the best. They're great people. Yeah. And they've done amazing things in their past. They've helped so many orphaned children find their parents. They've, you know, saved numerous puppies. They were once President of Belize actually and Venezuela. They've been president of two different countries in South America. Well, they once entered the NFL without ever playing and caught a Hail Mary. And didn't get tackled. So going to Diana. Yeah, she got the $10 million. Oh, she was on my fantasy football team. All right. Next story here. This is a quick one on USATF. So we've talked about the controversy around the Olympic trials. And to just give a little bit of a summary right now. It is a total shit show. No one knows what's going on. The local organizing community in Orlando is basically past the buck and said, guess what? We never even signed a contract about any about hope. We never even signed a contract about any about hosting this. USATF is saying, oh, we don't really care about the start time. But we kind of do. And meanwhile athletes have no idea what's going on. Yeah, it's really complicated. It also seems like it's kind of like a he said she said situation. Yeah. But there's no documentation of ever what was said. So it's just like multiple parties going back and forth. Yeah. And what's really interesting to me in the context of all this. Maybe a little bit of a message about the social fabric. Is Max Siegel, the USATF CEO. Got a contract extension for five years within this framework. It's like, I don't know exactly how much USATF does. But really, at the end of the day, this is one of the main responsibilities when you have this athlete facing opportunity. And they really drop the ball. Well, it's kind of wild how much he makes. So this is like public consideration. He made $3.8 million in 2021, which is a lot of money for a USATF CEO. When I heard that, I was like, wait a second, it doesn't make sense. But when you think about how much of USATF's total revenue was in 2021. So they had $33.6 million of total revenue in 2021. So his salary is 11% of that. That seems like pretty messed up based off of what you know about like what we know about like functioning organizations and how things run. But also a microcosm of society as a whole where CEO pay a skyrocketed and worker pay has remained stagnant relative to the inflate. Yeah. And in some situations, maybe that makes sense. But in this situation, it, to me, like totally baffles me. I'd love to hear the situations that make sense to pay a CEO like that much. I mean, I'm not going to say like 100% of this. I mean, there's probably some small situations where it does make sense. Very small. I'm trying to say, yeah, Sam Altman at OpenAI probably deserves that much with how much like chat TPC is going to change to the world. Oh, for sure. I would give somebody to Sam Altman. Yeah. Well, we do. We subscribe. But yeah. So really interesting story. We're going to keep updating you on what happens there. I think it's a really fascinating one. Okay. Maybe the last story we'll talk about here before we get to hot takes. Is Eric Senseman. Um, Trolliner who has been really great at the top level. He officially announced his retirement. Um, I think that's just kind of a really cool moment where Trollining is like a little bit more professional. But I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on it? Yeah. I think professionalization was the first thing that came to mind because. Well, I think like in Troll running, you can so often just compete. Not at the same level until you're like 75. And so. Or even later. Exactly. Exactly as your dad's doing. And then getting helicopter to the off. Yeah. But he's good. And he's coming back. Megan, as long as these local races have helicopters at the finish line, dad can race till he's 110. Yeah. He's crushing it. Uh, but it's, I mean, I think it was, it was eye opening to maybe because I think, like, people often just compete for it ever and ever. Yeah. And I can see us going that route. Like we love this so much. It's deeper within our hearts. But I can also see the challenge of like following that mindset. Yeah. And I think to me, it's fascinating. Do you think you're ever going to retire? I mean, it depends on my heart. It depends on how long I've said on the couch work. True. But I mean, I don't think so. I mean, I love maybe I'm not going to be doing 50 mile races forever. Yeah. Maybe at some point we're like trying to maximize our 5k or compete in gravel races or do rock climbing or do other things. But I think I love to move my body for the sake of getting better forever. But I think Eric will probably love to. So it's an interesting way to think about the sport. Well, it's like, is that retirement at that point, you know? Well, I mean, I think it would be in the context of like, I don't know, maybe like doing professional racing or something. But I don't know. Basically, this brings up a lot of mixed feelings for me because I'm like, well, the cool thing about trail running is that we don't need to retire. Right? Like the sport can always be ingrained in who we are in such a way that you can keep doing it without an announcement. Whereas like, that's also a really hard thing about trail running for a pros. It's like, you know, it takes, I mean, you ran 48 miles this weekend in the context of like family life, business life, and just like all the things that running through is at you. And like, this is our focus and our career. And so like, it's probably a lot easier for us to justify that. But imagine if it's not and you have like a separate career and a family and like all kinds of things going on, that's hard. Well, this is what you can do. You can be a mediocre father. That's my suggestion. It really helps look up the process. And actually, I had a quote earlier that I was going to say in reference to this, but it's actually a quote that really did resonate with me. So this is serious, but we'll be not serious a second after. Okay. Before you read the quote, though, you have been crushing it in that game. Yeah. No, I'm really bad at you. Yeah. You've like, I mean, you're doing big work, big training. But I feel like you've really, really shown up as a dad. I'm really good at that. The Him laugh. You, yeah. He loves you. Okay. So this is the quote. 20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids. Do you remember that we've said this on my podcast before we have? Yes. I said this on the podcast. Okay. Yeah. So one of my, like one of my athletes was reflecting on this like a year ago, and it was right around the time that Leo was born. And it was so important to me. In terms of heel, boom, why didn't you tell me before I, when I put it into the podcast outline? I wanted to tell you on live. So it's where that's it. You literally just wanted to dunk on me. I just want to be a little bitch. It's amazing. No, but I think it's, it's so important. It needs to be said twice though. For me, like when I heard that, it really resonated. I like it. Well, the only people that will remember that, you know, in 20 years from now, yeah, that I ran 48 miles are my kids and my strawberries, which are even more important than Leo and your type one muscle fibers. True. Yeah. We just, I mean, we just talked about that. It's true. Okay. Do you want to get on the hot tics? Let's do it. We have so many fun ones today. First one here. More ultra troll races, speaking as a European, need to allow for longer cutoff times to be less intimidating to newer slower and older runners. I like that hot take. That's a good one. I absolutely agree. Yeah. Yeah. No, I feel like there has to be a lot of room for this. Havelina actually is a race that has really great cutoff times and allows for like new people coming into this work. So one of my favorite coaching moments was Latoya Snell who lives in Brooklyn. Yeah. And, you know, doesn't have this like huge backyard of trails to train for. And she finished the Havelina Hunter K. It was one of the coolest moments ever. Yeah. And it was because like she was chasing cutoffs out there, but the cutoffs allowed her to do that. And like the amount of like inclusion that she promoted in inspiration from that was so cool. And it was a direct reflection of the cutoffs. Yeah. That's actually a great point about the sport in general. I think all the cutoffs should essentially be as like achievable as possible. Yes. Especially to you. I mean, at Havelina, they have a hundred mile race. And so it's not like the volunteers are like going to sleep or something. Yeah. I feel like for distances that have a hundred mile race and have a parallel like 100k, 50 mile, 50k. Make those cutoffs super generous. Yeah. But I think even doing a hundred mile if you can. Agreed. Yeah. Just try to set up frameworks with having the aid station stocked and things that makes it so that, you know, the sport isn't so scary. I mean, because it's scary enough, right? Like before my 30 mile run this weekend, I was like so scared. I just have the distance. Like the place I was running to, you can see from our front window. And it's so far away. And that's only halfway there. It's so wild. Actually, as I did my 50 mile gravel bike ride yesterday, I had the reflection. I was like, David's going to race this distance. Yeah. It's a long, long ways. Good job, coach. I think I feel good about this. No, you're going to crush it. But no, I totally agree. And I think the more that we can do that with cutoffs, I think it's going to like elevate the participants in sport and make us all better. Yeah. So race directors, I know a ton of race directors listen to this podcast. Try to add four hours to your cutoffs if you can. Yes. If there's any who would just go away to do it, it is worth it. Even if that touches just one person, the ripple effects of that where that one person who might have previously felt excluded can then lift up others is massive. And those types of things can change lives. And so the logistical struggles and strains of, you know, a little bit more time are worth it. Also, it is hard to chase cutoffs. Oh, my God. So hard. Like, I think in some sense, harder to chase cutoffs than it is to be at the front of the pack in many ways in terms of like the mental fatigue and bandwidth. And I don't think that's talked about enough. Definitely. So let's, let's blank in those cutoffs. Number two, if you pass me in the bike lane riding an e-bike, I'm a yellow cheater, especially if you don't give me a courtesy bell. Oh, heck yes. And especially if they're taking your Strava segments. I've had so many Strava biking Strava segments taken by e-bikes. That's the worst. E-bikes are the vapor flies. Yeah. So I have mixed feelings about this. Yeah. I am a massive e-bike fan. Oh, yeah. I mean, it supports people. I am do. It supports people getting out and trying new things. Yeah. Maybe those people go on and like ride regular bikes. I can see my dad at age 75 getting an e-bike and doing my efforts with me. Like, how cool is that? That would be so cool. Yeah. I kind of want to get them on. I've never ridden one myself. Yeah. But they look very fun. They're essentially motorcycles that give you what, that you can do watts on, which I'm a big fan of. But on the contrasting side, so my mixed feelings are I was on that 30-mile round. I went through this park that's mostly a biking park at this point, which is awesome. But all of a sudden, I'm coming down like an 800 foot per mile grade. So we're talking, you know, 15%. It's an early. Yeah. And a bike comes around the corner, blazing fast. And I didn't really resonate with me until I got around the corner. It's like, oh, that's an e-bike. Oh, that's a motor cycle. Yeah. Which gets a little complicated when you're talking about gnarly trails. This was in the snow up there. And it starts to make me feel like I imagine there's a lot of conversations to be had with e-bikes on kind of nasty trails. Dangerous. Yeah. I mean, what goes must come down. And I imagine you just get really like joy happy on the up. And then all of a sudden you're like, I got to get this motor cycle down. Yeah. That's hard. Yeah. And I wouldn't be very good at that. But, you know, as you said, I'm a pretty poor bike. Yeah. Maybe you would learn a lot better if you're on an e-bike. Yeah. The consequences are much higher. You just have to level up. Or I would die. Yeah. You'd level up. Yeah. Okay. You're ghost to be so great. Am I ghost to be good? Yeah. I would be the happiest, nicest, kindest ghost of all time. You know what I'd be like? Who? Casper. Do you remember Casper? Not very well. Okay. Well, Casper. This is important, Megan. We're at our 10th of the podcast. The listeners need to know about Casper. So if you never watch Casper, it's like a 90s movie. It's amazing. Yeah. So this kid dies in it at some point. Yeah. And he's a ghost. He's Casper. We don't see the kid. That's kind of that's good. For a kid to be. Yeah. But like a girl. So he's like a boy. A girl moves into the house and befriends the ghost. They become friends. Yeah. Do they bang? I don't think so. Though there's probably a porn version. I mean, I'm almost positive. There's a porn version. I mean, I should have to. But to really summarize the plot is there's a device that allows ghosts to become real again. And this little girl's dad dies in a car accident after he's drinking at the bar. Yeah. Okay. This is a kids movie. Yeah. This seems like an entirely problematic. Wait. Just wait. So this device or the potion or whatever is used on little boy Casper. The nicest ghost you've ever met. Yeah. David in ghost form. Yeah. Just really great. And they have a slow dance together. Oh, my God. Right. Yeah. And the poet, the, it's decided that it's much better that it is used for the dad who died after coming home from the bar. It is also very nice guy. Yeah. So instead Casper goes back to being Casper. Yeah. No longer a real human boy. And the dad is resurrected. And that's how it ends. Okay. This is a wild children's movie. Can you also explain? Can you also like imagine being a child just having navigated grief? Then also you're like, I'm just going to make this person reappear in my life. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of metaphors there and we don't talk enough about the movies we were raised on in the 1990s. We're almost universally fucked. Like across the board. There are so many storylines there that are so fucked. Yeah. But the main one being that in bang. They're children though. That's true. Okay. Okay. I think I had a really good community clause there. So we're going to keep that in. All right. Number three. Ground bananas are greater than green bananas. Kind of a jarring switch. That is it. I mean, it's a perfect switch because fuck both of those. I don't like bananas, green or brown. Yeah. But we started to get into them because Leo really likes them. Leo loves bananas. And you've been using, what is it, a magic bullet? Yeah. I put bananas in my protein shake, which I actually agree. Sounds like a vibrator by the way. Yeah. But it feels like the banana is not in there. It's in a different form. It's in a ghost form at that point. Yeah. By the time it's made it into my protein shake. Yeah. I just like yellow. I mean, it has to be like a perfect yellow banana. Yeah. The only food on the earth, which I'm picky about with my bananas. You're banana like press over here. I'm total banana press. But yeah, Leo's really into them. He's not a press. He would eat bananas of any color. Yeah. But brown bananas, I do not get it. Oh, they're so gross. I look for baking. Yeah. Yeah, when they're mixed into things. Yeah. But I don't understand how they're greater than green bananas. These green bananas have so much potential, right? Yeah. A green banana is going to become a perfect banana. Yeah. A brown banana is going to become reincarnated as banana bread, which is pretty great. Or she's going to die though. And so I feel like this is the first one that I fully disagree with today. Okay. Number four. My hottest take ever. And I fervently believe, believe this. Dark one in coming. Mm-hmm. Okay. We need a drum roll on this. Ready? But it's really selling at high. It's really selling at high. Is that the youngest generation of children is being ruined by phones and social media. And that phones and social media and Doom Scrollet are going to lead to the unraveling and downfall of modern technological civilization. Oh, of course. For sure. Yeah, for sure. For sure. That's not even a hot take. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the downfall of society is not about the platforms. It's about the way the platforms are being weaponized by bad actors. I mean, it's going to come from U-T-M-V. Let's be real. But like, no. The thing is, what we, yes, the platforms matter. Mm-hmm. But the way to deal with platforms in the same way that the way to deal with any carnivorous thing that just wants to, you know, suck up everything around it and is, probably not carnivorous isn't the right word here. Probably the right word is something that's parasitic. And is you need to have controls on it. You need to have regulations. Yeah. The problem is we don't regulate these platforms to have any accountability to what's on them or to what happens because of them. It's like Section 230 or whatever. That is such a weird and wild problem. It's like, literally all we need to do is say, hey, Facebook, you're accountable for what is put on your platform. Mm-hmm. You're a publisher. You're like any other media publisher. You're not just a group of people getting together and talking in the town square because that is not the way it's used and that has fucked up, not just politics and things like that, but also, you know, younger kids' mental health and their ability to move through the world, you know, in a way that's like healthy. Well, I think also younger kids are pushing back against that. Like, I think there's a lot more like, cumulative awareness. Oh. Like for us, like, I had Facebook in high school and like, no one ever talked about this stuff. Like, it just, it just, like, just came out. Do you remember when social media was hopeful? It wasn't that long ago. Yeah. It really wasn't that long ago. Which is kind of scary. Yeah. But no, I mean, I feel like a lot of younger kids are pushing back against us. We actually did a survey study. Like, it was part of a broader study in high school female runners. And, Renee, that's like a very selective population. There's probably high amounts of bias. But like, 35% of them weren't using any form of social media. Wow. Which I think that number gave me hope and it was a lot higher than I expected. Yeah, and so that's, I think the hope to end this with is like, yeah, I think it's cliche and a little bit of kicking the can down the road to say that the kids will save us. Yeah. But I think these zoomers really will save us. And they kind of have to. Do you say zoomers? Yeah. It's kind of the term used colloquially for that generation. Because like phones and social media, yeah, it's just a new form of technology. And new technology comes around all the time. Like, people said the same thing about TV. The TV would ruin young brains. And it didn't, you know, as I've said before, Casper is the most important thing in my development. Casper is why you're here today. Exactly. And the problem is just what we've allowed these things to become by just sitting on our hands. And like, if there's anything you can do, maybe it's like contact your representative to get a reform in this world, because there's bipartisan support. This is a place that both Republicans and Democrats agree that we need to, you know, fuck this shit up. Like, we need to change the system. But because there's so much lobbying, there's so much money in it, like, it hasn't. It's just really, really wild. And very frustrating, because we all see this unraveling caused by just like letting free market capitalism apply to platforms. Well, Joe is pretty wild. Both Democratic and Republican children were probably raised on Casper's ghost. Our politicians. They probably got very different messages from the movie. That's a good point. Yeah. One thing I noticed in politics now is like, people will take the same set of facts and draw totally different conclusions than like, I think are based in reality. If you had an amazing politician, Diane and I had. Yeah. You're right. She's your like storytelling ability. He's so great. Oh, God, Megan, do not plant the same. That is so scary. Okay. Next one. Vegetarians and vegans seem to have significantly lower baseline levels of creatine and karnasine than omnivores, and may stand to benefit most from creatine supplementation. Creatine could increase power output on strides, feeding back into running economy. And beta alanine could assist in lower lactate levels below lactate thresholds. There are no studies with vegetarian athletes, but there seems to be some general hypotheses. I concur. This hot take. This hot take is written by a researcher. Did you write this? No, no, no. Well, yeah, it's very interesting. And some broader interesting conversation points. I agree. Actually, I just had a conversation with a vegetarian athlete. And I was like, maybe we should try creatine. Yeah. I feel like there's some actually, this is a little bit of a hot take, but it's like. End of the podcast. Okay. Okay. Okay. Some of the worst blood profiles that I have seen in terms of like physiological parameters, whether that's like hemoglobin, hematocrate, iron, like all kinds of like breakdown have come from vegetarian athletes. And particularly vegetarian athletes that are not fueling their bodies adequately. And it's like there's just no reserves to support strong physiological profiles from that. And I think it's always helpful to have like backup. And I think protein powder, protein supplementation, beta alanine creatine, all amazing things. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe creatine most of all for the vegetarian and vegan athletes out there. Yeah. It's a place where I think we're also talking about muscle fiber technology, which is my theory on all this, much like this listener said, where there are general hypotheses, but nothing proven. And type two dominant athletes, let's say like me, might respond worse to creatine. And just given how it makes these muscle fibers operate, type one dominant athletes, like you, or athletes with autoimmune conditions like you, perhaps would succeed a little bit more. Vegetarian and vegan athletes definitely consider this. Oh, for sure. It could be really relevant. And also just like if you're slower to a general, I think creatine might be a little bit better than the faster twitch guys who I've seen cramp up a lot. There's been so many studies coming out looking at creatine. There's actually a study of really compelling study looking at creatine in early onset Alzheimer's, which is fascinating, thinking about like brain metabolism and having it help prevent some of the like plaques and tangles that exist in the brain from Alzheimer's. And yeah, I was interested. It's so fascinating. Yeah. I'm curious to see where that research goes. I took creatine for a few days and it made me feel pretty horrible. So I don't really have much personal experience with it. And not much personal experience with athletes either. I take it every day though. And I actually, I think it's coincided. I feel fantastic right now. I don't have hard issues. I was on the couch taking creatine for a bit. But no, I've actually felt really good since I started taking creatine. And so it's a place where we're a little bit conflicted. Because I would say in our professional athlete cohort, there's just a very small number to take creatine. This is not, and everyone does it thing. No. In fact, I think we should start talking about that when we talk about supplements and things. It's like, I would say 95% to protein supplementation. Yes, for sure. For sure. I think protein is probably 5%. I was going to estimate 5%. But I would say of the professional athletes I coach, I think 80% of them are vegetarians or vegans. Because I've been like, hey, let's think about this. Aren't vegetarians or vegans? They are vegetarians. They take creatine. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes. Wait, that's totally different than you've told me. It's like, you're the ultimate person trying to get your female athletes in particular to, you know, if they... Diversify their... That was the most least controversial way of saying what I was going to say. Which is a good thing because you know what? In the past eight minutes, we have like really gone about destroying that controversy. But we're in a hot dick section. Yeah. This is why we do it. By the way, we talked about moving them up. It's really nice to be that hour 15 into the podcast and just feel a little bit empowered. There might be some hate listeners that are still listening. Yeah. But probably not too many. Okay. Do you want to do one more? Let's do one more. Actually, let's do this one right here. Because it kind of feeds back into our earlier point. Okay. A lot of attention is going to the increasing professionalism in mountain ultra trail running. From the effect UTMB will have to how much pros might earn. And if the various media outlets can make enough money to survive. This is interesting. But no one is measuring what drives the whole train. What actually makes it all happen. Runners. Everyday runners. Runners by shoes. The shoe companies take that money to sponsor pros and races. And so it is the 1.77 million trail runners who make it all happen. They we slash you are the foundation. If there were no such thing as professional runner, not much would change. Except for the media who would need something to talk about. We'd all keep running and having a good time. But if everyday runners stopped, the whole thing would collapse the next day. Unlike most sports running as a participation sport rather than a spectator sport. Best to keep that in mind. So Haza, to you and you and you. Isn't that so well written? Yeah. Actually, we should just take our conversation on like our participation sport versus a spectator sport. And put that in because they said it a whole lot better than I did. And I really love how they wrote that. Yeah. So I agree. Yeah. I think the big thing I see there is just the democratic nature of the sport. Yeah. Is that cool? It's so cool. Yeah. Everyone is on the same footing. Like everyone deserves to be celebrated the same. And yes, the stories at the like professional racing. Or the often the ones that are told. And often the ones that allow. Like that allow the inspiration to come in. Exactly. According to Walter. I think is responsible for so much of that growth and trial running. Exactly. And that's a cool thing. Yeah. And so to see someone like Courtney or whatever. It's like. I don't know if I mean, and maybe that's like a counter to what I was saying earlier about the end. And I am. And I'm just happy to wrap up. Think about all that. That's fine. Yeah. I know that during the first year. And if the next year pack of Spr. So it's just thing we'll are working on right now. Yeah. And it's just like. Stephanie. Yeah, and that's not what I wanted to write today. Yeah. I'm like, If I had very little help from Wendy, Does she have any advice, If I can explain that to her thing and if I can't please. She Poland? Yeah. She can explain that to everyone. the exact way that, like, it's classified. Yeah. Can you imagine how atrocious that would be? This is, like, my bias, I swimming to me is just really hard of trying to feel in the water at, like, 90 grams, a carbs per hour. I'm sure we have some open water swimming experts that are listening, but I'm trying to imagine how they do it. My guess is that they turn themselves over, like, a beached whale to their back and then are doing, kind of, like, a backstroke or something. Oh, cool. And take, that'll be amazing. Or maybe they can just keep themselves up with their feet, actually. Wow. And then it's like a dolphin on the surface. Like, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, and then getting a little precision gel. Wow, that'd be wild. That'd be, like, something that, I was never around. I was going to say something that belongs to me. Like, I would watch that. I would fuck that. Yeah, I would, that's kind of where I was going. Like, keep yourself soft to their feet. Dolphins, dolphins, they say are really into it. That's, that's what I've heard. So, maybe it applies. But yeah, so, you know, the power is with us runners. Yeah. And to remember that, you know, like, this sport is beautiful and it's going to grow. And, you know, in that growth, I think there's so much opportunity to bring love and light into the sport. And so, let's be the love and let's be the light. Even when we disagree with things. Like, keep that at the forefront. This can be open and kind and caring. And, you know, we need to keep others accountable, like UTMB and other figures in the sport to also embody that. I love that. Let there be love. Let there be love. And precision gels. Yes. So, speaking of things, we should promote. How about some athletic grains? Oh, yeah. You should have bonkers. Good. I started taking it in the morning again. Right after I wake up, it has changed my life, Megan. My, I felt so good on my runs. It powered my week this week. So, drink AG1.com slash swap SWAP. SWAP. There you get a ton of bonuses. It's the best way to support the podcast other than subscribing your Patreon. And it is so good. What you want's really fascinating is I've been having, I've been having, like, my runs and bikes are done at a heartic cap. Yeah. But if I drink athletic grains before I go out the door, I get at least, like, 10 or 15 seconds per mile at the same heart rate. Yeah. Like, it lowers my heart rate as I'm out there, which is something that's, I mean, I have a lot of data on this. And I've seen other athletes do the same thing. Maybe we need to talk about this earlier in the podcast at this point, to try to get a little bit of, like, a control effort going where we get some information from people. Yeah. But same thing with me. My heart rate, especially a lactate threshold, goes down pretty substantially in a good way. As does my perceived exertion. Yeah. I don't know if it's just because I'm, like, I have the magic of the green juice or what it is. But I mean, it's pretty much, like, I don't think about that on daily basis. So it's pretty legit. It must be some ingredient in it. Yeah. So one of those points where try it for yourself, drink AG1.com slash swap SWAP SWAP. It is awesome stuff. Okay. On the listener corner, this one actually came in via Patreon, which you can tell because it's in green. And for some reason, Patreon has changed their thing and I get everything in green now. Which is great, actually. Anytime we see green text, we can just send it to an extra love. Yeah. We have our Patreon listeners. So you're going to see this person is amazing. You should be on Patreon too. Patreon.com slash swap SWAP bonus posts, bonus podcasts, basically all of our online content goes there. It is awesome. And access to gear. Accept crop tops, because you know what? We're almost sold out. Oh, yeah. We did the crop top challenge. And we've, we sent out a few crop tops and it seems like, yeah, get so many crop tops. I sent out. How many? Like 30. Oh my God. Sorry. Sorry. I was 30 free crop tops. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So it's a really, really, really nice ghost. Okay. Yeah. But you know what? I affirm it. Okay. Typically, like, I'm the one that comes down hard. It's going to strategy. But when it involves crop top and then involves like spreading love, I'm off for it. That was $1,800. I just get good shadow way over here. Okay. You're never shitting away anything. It's a crop top. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. You're shitting rainbows. So anyone out there who got a crop top, hopefully you enjoy it. Keep us updated. Hopefully we can share some messages from you and at least get some content from the $800 expense. All right. Listen to our quarter. That he's very grateful for your podcast, which I only started listening to a couple months ago. Because by now, I'd be a month deep into Christmas music playing at nonstop. It's so comforting and makes me happy. But instead, he's getting an earful of sexy science and incredible life slash training insights from you both. Listening to your podcast and reading the happy runner has brought me even more joy than listening to Christmas music and has helped me reflect more on my impact on those around me. I've experienced a lot of instances where my positivity and kindness was looked down on or had people looking at me like a bimbo of sorts. Oh, wow. I'm an engineer and I should know by now that's not true. But it hardened me for a while, especially as I was in a corporate role, managing a bunch of things that I don't want to say because it's a little specific to their life. One of my biggest sacrifices that is going to sound so dumb was not using exclamation points in my emails. Who had I become? The corporate machine was killing me after a year of misery and feeling like I was darkening the world around me rather than lighting it up like I've always loved to do. I finally said fuck it and I quit my job for another job that is so rewarding, even if I only make half of what I used to. I did all that before listening to the podcast and reading happy runner. But since doing so, you both have reaffirmed my decisions and helped me regain my spunk joy and love for sharing enthusiasm with the world and making it a brighter place. Not to mention I crushed for me my first trowel race thanks to your training plan and insights. There's too many exclamation points in one email and not giving a fuck. So much love to you both. Woohoo. Oh my gosh. I love this listener. Even more than I love Christmas music, which I totally affirm Christmas music is the best in Tis the season. No, it's absolute torture and other than Mariah Carey can't do it. That's David's hot take. Yeah. But actually recently, my email outlook every time I have more than one exclamation point, it gives me a blue line underneath and it's like error using more than one exclamation point. And I need to figure out a way to override that. This doesn't when I add letters to something. So I like to like add a bunch of like, I have to end a woohoo like a thousand o's and just corrects it down. To what's fun is to add a bunch of ages to Hazal. Yeah. Yeah. That was really fun. So the letter, the word in here that really stuck out to me. Was it, can I guess? Yes. Bimbo. Bimbo. Yeah. I haven't heard that word in a long time. Yeah. I've heard it in the context of hymbos. Yes. Which is a different context and I'm not going to get into it. That's an aside. We've already run really wrong. I love the use of that word because you know, I think that it's gendered for sure right in this context, but everybody out there who has tried to spread love and light has the same feeling like that other people don't take them as seriously in some way. Yeah. Because of this perceived simplicity, let's say, that could be defined as a bimbo or whatever you want to call it. And it's like, absolutely fuck that. Like if you look at the darkness of the world that we've talked about a lot on this podcast in various contexts and like health issues and all that. And you can come out the other end and be kind and use exclamation points. That is the most complex thing a human can do. The easy thing to do is to be serious and to tear others down and do all that other shit. So let's all be positive fucking Bimbo. Oh, I 100% agree. I actually even have this bias of like, you know, sometimes it's like, who I meet with or who I take students on, it's like the people that send exclamation points and there is a limit. There's a limit. Like we both acknowledge that every once in a while, I'll be like, I should probably take out a few of these. Same. Same. You can overdo it. I try to do it in every other sentence thing. Oh, interesting. Almost every sentence could be an exclamation point. I'm like an every third sentence. Okay. But there's a lot of them. But no, I totally have bias in it. And it's like when I see that happen, I'm like, this person understands universe. They do. Yes. They've seen Casper the Ghost. Yeah. I mean, think about it. You look at like what Casper's talking about is death and grief. Yes. And in that sense, it is very meaningful even if they did it through some very interesting lenses. And, you know, when my dad was in the hospital, like, what first thing I think is to you, is like, do you think he's going to die from this, you know? And like that thought, I think, is in the back of everyone's mind all the time. And we're all screaming about it, even if we don't actively think about it. Like we're all like, we're fucking dying. And we're caring about all this shit. And if you know that everybody else is going through that. Oh, my God, the giving them hugs and love and shit is the best thing you can do. Because that's the only thing that adds a little bit of light to this broader, really cosmic darkness. We all have to understand. So let's be the light because otherwise it's just dark. And that can be cool, but it's so much better if you have some flashlights with you. I love it. And it's really fitting that it all ends in cosmic darkness. Yes. Astronomy. You and I was at light. What? Giving our podcast five stars. Oh, yeah. How does that add light? Adds light to our lives. To our buildings. I lost this $1,800 this weekend. And if more people rate, more people find the podcast, more people will buy athletic greens and subscribe to our Patreon. And then I will not have like made our lives much harder for our family. Okay, that's fair. But you know, I'm also kind of a five star person because I just like a great joy. Like five stars. Five stars. Here it is. Here it is. Yeah. And that's actually another message is like be a bimbo with anything you enjoy. Send messages. And it actually makes a huge difference like being on the receiving end of messages. And I send a lot of them to honestly both feel really good. And yeah, it means a ton. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'll definitely get a response from us. 99.9% of the times every once in a while we fuck up. Yeah. Very rarely. But when you send to other people, you might not get a response. But it's still meaningful to like send someone affirmation that they're doing a good job in the world. I send it all the time to like taught names and not running and just like random things. And get a response one out of a hundred times. But like when someone is meaningful to you, tell them because we all need that little bit of light. And a little bit of online bimbo ship can go a long way. I love it. Well, do you know what? What? You're super meaningful to me. No, I'm serious. I'm like dead serious. Yeah. Am I going to be a bimbo ghost? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bang that. I love you, Megan. And we love you all. Woohoo.