Healthy Endurance Nutrition with Warren Pole

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Athlon podcast finding out how ordinary people do extraordinary things.

If you start with something like a chia seed, well, it doesn't just have a bit of carbohydrate in it. It's got carbs, it's got protein, it's got fat, it's got omegas. Like, suddenly nature gives you so much. And a superfood is not. It's not anything unique. It's just a food with an unusually high concentration of nutrients within it.

That was Warren Poll. This episode is healthy Endurance Nutri. When I got into endurance sport, it was to be as healthy as I possibly could be. So when I started looking at how I fueled my endurance sport, I had a bit of a conflict of interest in that I wanted to be able to run or cycle for long distances and therefore I needed fuel. But when I looked all the products on the market, I just kept looking at ingredients and seeing them as some sort of weird chemistry experiment. And it just didn't tie in with the approach to life I'd had in the lead up to getting into endurance sport. And it didn't seem to be the right way going forward, but it seemed like the only option. And it was only in recent years where I started discovering products like 33 fuel and realizing that actually there is an alternative to the unhealthy endurance fuel that we have out there, that actually I started to work out how I could best fuel myself, but in a healthy way. And so I really wanted to get Warren onto this podcast. At the time, I hadn't experimented and tried their products, but I now have and I genuinely love their products. And I think that, you know, I love their Chia Seed gel, I love their, their bars and, and their pre and post recovery shake. So it was a fantastic opportunity to chat to Warren to really try and get a better understanding of what goes into their products and what was the motivation behind creating 33 fuel. So I hope you enjoy the conversation and I hope you also take out of it some ways that you can fuel your endurance sport in a healthier way. This podcast is brought to you by 33fuel.com. Now, if you're like me, when you're doing your endurance sport, you want to avoid those products that look, when you look at the ingredients, they look like a chemistry experiment. But it can often be difficult to avoid them and still have the energy for the sport. So 33fuel.com produce an amazing set of products, whether it be gels, bars or powders, but packed full of awesome superfoods so that you can not only get faster and fitter, but you can also get healthier at the same time. If you listen to this podcast, at the end I'll give you a discount code to get a nice saving off your first 33fuel.com order. So check it out@33fuel.com personally, I absolutely love their products, particularly their Chia Seed gel. This podcast is brought to you by Innovate Running Shoes. Anything that's good enough for Damien hall and Nikki Spinks to run the incredible distances along the trails that they do in and actually sing the praises of is certainly going to be good enough for me. But I have to say I've really enjoyed running in the Terra Ultra Shoe. It is a fantastic shoe, really light with fantastic grip, just a great shoe. And so Innovate do a whole range of shoes and a load of range of clothing as well. So check it out@innovate.com that's inov-8.com in of-8.com I know you won't be disappointed. And also hang on to the end of this podcast and I'll give you a discount code too.

Right.

Welcome to the Tribathlon podcast, Warren. Thank you very much for joining me. You know, so we were introduced by Luke Tversky and I feel like I know you already because you feature so prominently in the Ultimate Triathlon on Amazon Prime. But I've been really intrigued to find out a little bit more about you and about 33 fuel and about your business now. But before we sort of dive into that and your Ironman history as well, do you want to just give me a bit of your. Tell me your story. How have you got to where you are now and tell me a little bit about 33 fuel and what you're up to at the moment?

Well, I'll give you a brief overview touching on what we were just talking about there. So did a lot of sport, rugby, cross country through school and university, but had a lifelong obsession with motorbikes, which took me into motorcycle journalism and took me out to your neck of the woods. I was living in Peterborough and then out into the countryside sort of up until my 30s. After university, sport really dropped off for me, but with the motorcycle riding and I was also racing them, you know, there was a level of fitness being kept up, but between the knocks from rugby, the knocks from not always staying on motorbikes at times, and the fact that in your 20s your body's pretty bulletproof and it'll absorb most things. So the partying and everything else was all being absorbed. Well, got to my 30s though, and I was a wreck. It was time to revisit and I literally could not run. I couldn't run for a bus, I couldn't. It wasn't a fitness thing. There was still some aerobic fitness, but there was just, my body was too, there was too many injuries and things I hadn't fixed. So a friend said to me, let's, why don't we run the marathon to sow?

Well, that's an obvious first starting point, isn't it?

Which is your natural stepping off point, right? I had this stupid, naive, slightly arrogant belief. I just had a feeling I could do it and I have no idea why, because like I said at the time, I couldn't have run across the road and I was kidding myself that I still possessed fitness that I'd had at school and university and I didn't really. But this goal, it was a two year waiting list at the time and this goal of the marathon desaab, which really got under my skin, gave me. I said, right, I've got one year to see if I can actually run again. And that made me focus on my rehab. And what do you know when you go to the physio and actually do the exercises, they tell you you can get better much quicker than if you tell them you did them when you didn't, which is what I've been doing previously. And you can see there's a mindset shift coming on here. And I couldn't have understood it at the time, but this goal allowed me to temporarily shelve all of my, let's say, behaviors that become less than useful. So not doing rehab, not doing training, those were not useful behaviors. Not eating very well, drinking too much, all of those things had to shelve them because suddenly I was doing this race. It's very easy to eat better or stop drinking or really cut down your drinking when you have a goal like this that you care about. And it's also easier. It was easier for me to do it with my peer group because again, we were all sort of late 20s, early 30s, and you know, everyone's out partying and then, oh, what are you doing? Going home early, have another drink. It's quite hard to resist that at that age, even if you don't quite understand why. And instead I was able to go, you know, I'm running the marathon de Saabe. And then somebody go, what's that? And before you know it, people are, oh my God, he's running across the desert, get him off soda water. It was so easy to make these positive changes that I needed to make anyway. I was able to do all that while telling myself, well, this is just temporary. I'll go back to normal when I've run this race. But I got to the finish line of the Marathon de Sable and I realized that finish line was a start line. I felt better physically, mentally than I had done since my early 20s, probably before. Why would I ever go back? You know, it's not that I don't drink, but I'd realized that looking after myself, serious volumes of endurance exercise, good food, all of these things were so much more beneficial. And I was having almost more fun hanging out with my friends, training because more of us got into it than, you know, we'd learn more about each other's lives in a two hour training session than we ever did in seven hours in the pub. So the balance was shifted. And that finish line in the marathon, that was the start point of an addiction to endurance exercise that's morphed into basically just a total addiction to fitness and health. And that became the journey that nutrition was a real problem for me in those long races in the early days. And that problem of like, this stuff makes me feel sick. It seems to do that to a lot of other people. I don't enjoy using it and it doesn't seem to work in terms of nutrition products. That sparked a journey for Erica, myself and our third partner, Dan, to go and see what can we get some better products. And we couldn't. So this was 2011. We started making them ourselves, much with the same sort of naive enthusiasm that allows you to go, I can't run, but I think I'll do the marathon. De Saab to go. I know nothing about the, you know, the sports nutrition industry. I think we'll launch an entire range of products that no one's ever seen before. And that's really the jumping off point that brings us to you. Fast forward through that journey and. And here we are today.

Brilliant. I completely buy into that. But there's so many similarities between my story and, you know, I had a. I probably didn't, I didn't get to endurance sport until a lot later than you. So I wasn't just turning 30, I was closer to 40. But, you know, I'd gone through. I got into cycling and then exercise, then running and swimming afterwards because. And I'm going to come on to talking. I know we've got similarity around the whole Tony Robbins things. I'm going to come back to Talk about that later on, but because I realized that my unhealthiness was my biggest limiting belief, to use Tony's terms. And it kind of inspired me to eat more healthily and exercise more. But then there became this massive conflict of, you know, I want to exercise more. I want to use fuel so I can exercise more. And I've gone through the last few years of eating really healthily on the back of this drive to eat, to kind of be the best person I could be. And then you start looking at the ingredients of all of these gels and bars, and you think, like, there's more sugar in this bar than I would want to have the entire week almost. And there's ingredients in this gel that I've no idea what they are. I mean, as you describe on your website, it's like a. Like a chemistry experiment. And you think, how can that be in work? In line with the mantra I've been trying to live by. So how easy was it to get into creating your nutrition products and kind of how have they evolved over the years?

So, I mean, our stepping off point for the products was exactly the same as yours. You just don't need to be a rocket scientist or a nutritionist or a dietitian to understand fruit and vegetables and fresh foods are good for you. Generally, processed ingredients and chemical formulas are not. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with junk food. The clues in the name, no problem with that. But don't take the same ingredients that are in the processed junk food, put them in a packet and call them sports nutrition. That was kind of our point. It's the exact point. Logically, it makes no sense. So we were, Erica, myself, we were very focused on superfoods. And so we started learning more about those chia seeds, algae, like spirulina chlorella. And it's very attractive because suddenly, instead of a processed ingredient which has been chemically altered, taken right the way down, for example, maltodextrin, found in most energy gels and sports drinks, in fact, it's the most ubiquitous ingredient in sports nutrition. It starts its life as corn, most ordinarily, but by the time it's been processed down to this, like, white hydrolyzed starch, it's so far removed from that bit of food, it's not doing anything for you. Whereas if you start with something like a chia seed, well, it doesn't just have a bit of carbohydrate in it. It's got carbs, it's got protein, it's got fat, it's got omegas. Suddenly nature gives you so much. And a superfood is not anything unique. It's just a food with an unusually high concentration of nutrients within it. So if you then start to shine a light on what are the ones that athletes need most, then you can put together these hugely powerful formulas using multiple whole food ingredients. And so that's where we started. So it all sounds very simple. Looking back on it, it was a bloody disaster when we started out because these ingredients, they're not easy to work with. A number of them have challenging flavors, to say the least. They have shelf lives. They go off. Don't ever get chia seeds wet and leave them for more than like 48 hours. They'll stick to everything in sight. We had to get rid of the carpet in our apartment at one point because too much chia dropped on it. And I remember an early experiment, you know, I'd read all about Chia. I'd researched it. It was just the ultimate endurance fuel. And there's a long history. If anyone's read Chris McDougall's book Born to Run the Tarahumara who are the South American running tribe who do these amazing distances. The Chia with a bit of water and stuff was pretty much their go to. So I was totally sold on this because after a similar journey to you where I followed the standard advice, I'd use the standard products, you know, a gel every half an hour or whatever it is you're doing, endurance events, you can't get four of those things down in two hours, let alone you're doing 10 and 12 and 24 hours. It just gets miserable. And on top of that, I was at a stage where the more product I use, the more I needed. And we can go into why that happens. And it's just a standard what that consuming that volume of processed sugar, what it will do to your requirement and your energy needs. So you need. I was needing more and more of it, but it made me feel worse and worse. My immune system was shot to pieces. I caught every, every bug going. So that really interrupted me my training and recovery. And I just saw cheersies. This is going to be it. Anyway. This experiment went so badly wrong. I was running the London to Brighton route and that's so out for a weekend and just running that as a bit of training. And I had water bottles with chia seeds and I filled them with what I thought was the right amount of water. This is perfect. This one bottle is going to get me all the way to Brighton and I'm a couple of hours in and I'm ready to have something to eat. And, well, it totally clogged the bite valve of the water bottle. It wouldn't even come out of the water bottle. Right. The cheer had expanded in the water. Oh, that's not working. So then I had to, like, take the top off. I'm trying to run and drink from an open cycling water bottle because it wouldn't go through a bite valve on a. On a Camelback and it's sort of spilling all down my chin and Chia on its own with water, I'm not going to say it's not nice.

I have tried it.

It's kind of plain. Right. I mean, wet cardboard on a good day is effectively what you've got. And so there I was thinking I had this magical fuel to get me to Brighton and instead what I sort of had was just sort of cheer stuck to me, dribbled down the front of my T shirt and I ended up bailing and having to go to a petrol station and get something else. So those early days of. Of experimentation were you have to get things wrong to get them right. And that was where we learned what wouldn't work. And we literally began. The point that unlocked it for us was our third partner, Dan, who. He spent a decade studying superfoods for health and wellness at that point, but had not looked at a sporting application. And we met him through a very coincidental family connection. And he's actually Canadian originally, but he was in London and he ended up staying in our place and we worked together for a couple of months, formulating different things, guinea pigging them out. Then he was the one who unlocked what we were trying to do and allowed us to create formulas that worked. And from that point we've adopted a pretty strong process now, where when people tell us it can't be done, when manufacturing or packaging suppliers, where it says, well, you can't possibly do that, that's when we know we're onto the right track. It's just what we do is not built the way standard sports nutrition is, but you build a skill set that allows you to work with ingredients they don't use to deliver products that deliver the functional abilities you need. But also they're able to be used logistically. You know, they're portable, so you use them the same way you would use an ordinary sports nutrition product, but you get a totally different result. And that skill set has evolved from day one of me chugging knee Chia in a field Somewhere outside Crawley and it all going wrong 10 years ago, whatever it was, to now we're developing custom product for the likes of England football because the skill set we have doesn't exist anywhere else. That's the evolution of it. Step one to step two now. Brilliant.

And so what was. Now you've got, you know, you've got protein shakes, you've got energy bars, you've got gels. What was the first one? What was the first product that you managed to nail?

The first product we nailed was the. It's now the elite pre and post workout shake. It's got 33 ingredients in it. That's what. So originally the company was called 33 Shake. For any budding entrepreneurs out there. Entrepreneurs 101 Startup 101. Don't name your company after your first product because you will probably make more. We had this shake with 33 ingredients. We're like, well, we'll be 33 shake. It'd be great. And we were for several years. But ultimately we then developed the Chia Energy gel, which is our four ingredient all natural energy gel. Then came the Greens, the protein. The greens just picked up runners world health product of the year, which was a really nice, nice award for us. Really happy to get that. Then we brought out two bars, the Amore energy bar, the Eroica protein bar. They're handmade in Italy. The whole story back there, that goes back to Erica and I's wedding out there. Erica's Italian. That would be the Italian connection on that side. And so the range has really, really grown. But it all began, it began with that shake and it began with, bear in mind, even at the early point of this, I still had some skepticism around these ingredients. I bought into it. But early days I was like, are you sure? A bit the way maybe some people would be with something like a Tony Robbins or a meditation. You have to be careful who you talk to these things about. Not everyone is going to understand it. And it was when, as we formulated that shake and I was using it regularly and guinea pig testing it, the weirdest thing happened to me. Case study of one as a lifelong asthmatic who'd been dependent on inhalers. No matter how fit I got, I still needed inhalers morning and night. My asthma just upped and went. No change in training, no change in anything else. The only change was I was taking the shake daily as we tested it and developed it. And at that point I was 100%. I cannot buy into the power of what we can do with these Ingredients more. That was my sort of personal total tipping point to the project and I'm.

Sad enough to have gone through and looked at some of the ingredients and I'm because I'm you know, very much of a similar mindset.

So.

And I kind of at the moment my morning shake or you know, my kind of recovery shake would be part of vegan protein powder, part hemp protein powder, bit some wheat grass in there which I know you've got in yours. And I'm actually, I'm just looking at it thinking you basically. And then I also use a sachet of some other frozen fruits and maybe something, some fresh fruit as well. But I'm looking at your, your shape, thinking well you've got your wheatgrass, you've got your spirulina which I used to take and then I got lazy and don't anymore. You've got some great ingredients in there. And particularly, I mean I think the wheat grass which actually I found about out about for the first time on the Tony Robbins Unleash the Power within has made a massive difference to my immune system. And like you kind of gone from having every bug possible to not having them at all. And I'm sure that's a key component. But there's so much I want to talk about just with regards to the ingredients. But to start off with, why did you pick pumpkin protein and sunflower protein? Because so many of them are based on, you know, on legume protein. Is there a particular reason you avoided legume based protein and where did that any reason why you started off there?

The biggest thing with any sports nutrition product and we work with a number of elite national or Olympic or elite teams, athletes, bodies, coaches and their problems are the same in many ways as the amateur athlete where it doesn't matter what you know, it matters what you do. Now again, common message from Tony Robbins or Jim Rohn or others out there. If knowledge was power, librarians would rule the world. It's about application of knowledge, right? So you can have the best nutrient profile possible. But if you don't also have something that's enjoyable or easy to use or convenient, functional, whatever it may be, it's got to be all of those. The product has to be all of those things in order for you to get compliance. So in the elite sphere, that means the athlete takes it when they're meant to, but in the Amazon sphere, the same thing. It's a product you use. Doesn't matter how good it is unless you're going to use it. So what we have to do. A lot of plant based proteins have challenging flavors. So it's about blending them to make sure you've got the correct amino acid profile and the correct amount of protein. But you've also got something that mixes well, blends well, tastes good and is enjoyable. And that's, that's generally the reason why we blend the proteins we do in order to get the end result that the product is that nice that it almost doesn't matter even if you don't buy into the benefits, you just use it because it tastes nicer than what you used to.

Well, I think that's really, I think that's brilliant because I haven't tried plenty of different vegan proteins. I'm with you on the taste fly. I mean it is, they can taste quite metallic or really kind of artificial and not good. So you know, I haven't tried yours yet, but I can absolutely buy into why you do that. But I actually also wondered whether there was a guy called Dr. Stephen Grundy who had a book published called the Plant Paradox and he's really anti legumes because of the lectins within them. And so I had wondered whether that was an underlying reason. But. But no, brilliant. And in terms of the wheatgrass and spirulina, what were your, what were your reasons for putting those in there?

So I mean this, this stuff, it was about maximizing effectively the elite pre and post shake that we do. It's a product that if we looked at sports nutrition, we looked at, you know, if you could make the ultimate pre workout shake or something you can use for breakfast on race day, the ultimate post workout shake, many of the requirements are the same. If you could make that product with no holds bar, what would it be? Because one of the biggest problems in sports nutrition in the industry as a whole is that the business model really goes against innovation. The biggest companies out there, many of them are losing money. It's a marketing war because the underlying product is basically the same. Everyone's using the same ingredients. So people have to spend more on sponsorship, more on marketing, more on branding, more on advertising. The one thing they never spend more on is the actual ingredients. So this is why we have the crazy situation where the first energy gel came out in 1987 and by about 91 or 2 goo had patented a maltodextrin and fructose energy gel. Now that 1990 early 90s product is still the same formula that you will find in every ordinary energy gel, be it Torq High 5 CIS Wiggle you buy the cheap ones that wiggle. You buy them from high five, you buy them from sis same multidextron fructose combo with a couple of other bits and pieces. But what that means is these products haven't evolved at all. Like, can you imagine anyone getting to the start line of an Ironman today and using a bike from 1992? Right. It just wouldn't happen. Whereas, so what we were trying to do, we go, okay, let's forget that business model. How can we make products where we can really turn up the ingredients? And that's why we only sell direct to customers online, because we can't afford a retail margin. There's so much more in the actual product. And the shake with 33 ingredients is the ultimate expression of that. So that really covered every base with what are the most powerful sources of things? What's going to help your immune function? What's going to help you burn fat? What's going to help you your mental alertness, what's going to help your mood? What's going to help your sleep quality? How do we also get the best amount of protein in there, plus a little bit of carbohydrate? And when you start spreading the net that wide, that's why we do have. You've got your plant proteins in there for the protein, but we've also got things like reishi mushroom, which is actually officially recognized in Japan as a treatment for cancer. You have all of these things in there. These are very, very powerful whole food ingredients. And almost even if you weren't training the things you want in your diet daily anyway. But as we both discovered, they're not always that palatable. So it was also blending it. So when you blend that thing up, tastes like a chocolate milkshake. But every ingredient in there, we were like, what's the dream team? And that's what that one is.

Well, I think when I finished Unleash the Power, Lynn, I started having. I was literally just having a spoon, a teaspoon of wheatgrass, and a teaspoon of spirulina mixed in with water. And it was like drinking soil every morning. And it was absolutely. I mean, my children just couldn't get over how horrid this thing was. But what was interesting is having just had those two elements. I went from being ill regularly to never being ill. And then I started to question whether it was other lifestyle decisions that had caused my immune system to be that much stronger. So I dropped the wheatgrass and the spirulina, but I carried on with Everything else. And I started getting ill again. And so I then have literally about a year ago reintroduced wheatgrass into my, you know, into my diet. And bingo. I'm not getting. And Omega 3, actually the two I dropped two at the same time. Bingo. Not been ill since. And it's just I thought so I know that you've got a document on your website that you can download, but tell me a little bit more about this whole kind of linking in with the immune system and the products, but also with the training because I think you can quite easily sort of deplete our immune system through endurance training. So tell me a little bit about that.

I massively. You're exactly right. And I love your personal experimentation because that's the best mindset for unlocking the best results. Right. And it's what you would do in business. It's clearly what you've done in business. It's what you would do with your training. And so often people overlook nutrition or other parts. We are all an experimental one. So the first point is exactly like you've done. It doesn't matter what I say, it doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter what your buddy who you train with says, doesn't matter what the marketing says. If a product does not deliver for you, then try something else. You know, it doesn't matter that some elite athlete uses it. Often they're being paid to use it and they're almost there. In cases we have come across, they're being told by their coaching staff not to use it because they don't want a meeting. So you've got to find your own path. But when we come to endurance sports in particular, we run a very high risk of knocking out the immune system through what's called post exercise immunosuppression or PEIs to its mates. And all that is, is when endurance you go above the kind of two hour mark and beyond, you are going to temporarily knock out your immune response to one degree or another, which means you're more likely to pick up those bugs as they go around. When you combine this with nutrient negative foods, that is highly processed sports nutrition products, which are what the majority of the market is, you're feeding your body with things that actively damage gut health. They actively increase inflammation and acidity within the body. They're actively not helping your immune system. So you're already knocking yourself out with your training and you're then fueling that training with products that make the problem worse. Then at the end of that training you come to a standard protein shake or something, which will traditionally be a multidextrin fructose blend with whey protein in it. And I have nothing against whey protein for people who want to use it. Perfectly good product if you get a nice organic one, but there is going to be a little more acidity in that. And then particularly when you bring in the sweetness and the preservatives that are used in the majority of products, you're literally. It's almost like you started a fire and you're going to try and put it out by throwing matches at it. So what happens in this compound situation is the training renders the body temporarily less able to deal with infection and illness, but the standard fuel for that training compounds the problem. So the two things on their own at that point, you're recovering more. At best, you're recovering much more slowly than you could, which means your training gains are going to be greatly reduced, you're not going to reach your full potential and at worst you're going to be in the situation that you and I found us in, which is where you just get sick all the time. And as we all know, you don't train very well when you're ill. And by changing the paradigm nutritionally, you are able to give the body not just fuel that sustains itself through the exercise and the training, so you can really optimise performance there. But you're able to recover more quickly, you're able to recover stronger, you're able to train again more quickly, you get ill less often, if at all. So once you put this holistic approach in place, which is going to cover your training, your prehab and your rehab for any sort of injury, because we don't go fast when we're injured, sleep quality hydration, as simple as just drinking water. You know, you make sensible lifestyle choices about how much alcohol and when and how much. If you do want foods that are not ideal, well, that's great, there's no problem with that. But you periodize that, you get your sleep quality done, you put the nutrition in, you can build yourself so much stronger. And none of these changes cost any more money to make. It's just about applying a different mindset to it. Brilliant.

And I suppose there's just so many. I've got so many avenues I want to go down because there's so much to talk about, but I'm just going to touch on the gels because I think. And you've done a few Ironman. How many Ironmans have you done?

So I've done one full one half a couple of mid. Where would Alpe d' Huez triathlon sit? I guess that's kind of. It's a lot longer than average, but it's not iron. So, yeah, a fair few.

And which was your full Ironman? Full was Switzerland and that was do. I remember reading that was 922.

Oh, no, no, no. That's going back a while. I think 2015 maybe.

Oh, I see. So what was your. What sort of time were you doing your Ironman Switzerland in?

Well, Iron Man Switzerland was. I'll have to get out the big Book of excuses. I was shooting for a sub 12 of my first Iron man and it didn't quite happen because first of all, I got a puncture and realized I'd left my pump in transition. And a kindly rider gave me his pump. That was great. I got going again and then a funny noise came from my gears and my chain snapped and wrapped itself around my leg and I got off the bike and I was running with the bike, so what else can I do? And one of the neutral service bikes went past. He said, are you okay? I said, no. He said, great, and kept going. That's not helping. So I'm still running with my bike. And eventually another service bike came along. I pretty much threw the bike in the road in front of him, got repaired. Anyway, big Book of excuses lost me an hour and a half. So not exactly the time I was looking for. But, you know, first time out in the Ironman and there would be a lot of. A lot of things could go wrong, but the one.

And when you go back and have another go.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That's why. So it was the half Ironman was last year. So in the last two or three years, work has been so intense that there wasn't really an opportunity to put racing in the calendar. And a Half Ironman was the first one that went back in last year, so that was Whistler in Canada. Did that one last summer, which was great. And a lot of the time before that, it was ultramarathons that really, really got me going. So I've done about 35 of those over the years as well. And that segues nicely into the Ironman thing because, you know, as you will find, the more of these people you hang out with who do these sports, as we were talking about earlier, the more people who are going longer, going further, doing something different.

Absolutely. Well, ultras is something that I haven't explored yet, but I definitely want to explore because it's a Fascinating area. But I was just going to kind of come back to my Ironman last year because I, you know, I thought really intensely about the right nutrition strategy and I think I got most of it right. The mistake I made was going to gels too early. I know gels don't work well for me, but there is a certain, there is a point where you cannot stuff any more energy bars inside you. And so gels, kind of gels to sort of fit into the gaps, don't you? And I hit gels probably a little bit too early. And it wasn't my first Ironman, it wasn't my fitness that was going to stop me getting to the end of it. It was actually my stomach. My stomach was the only kind of risk of me not finishing that Ironman in the end. And I'm absolutely sure it was because of the gels I was having. So how have you managed to get a high quality ingredient gel and does it have the same effectiveness as one of these modern things that looks like a chemistry experiment?

Yeah, so I mean prehistoric things actually.

Sorry.

Yes.

Does your energy gel, do you expect that to give as much energy and obviously how does it sit in from a, from a digestion point of view?

So yeah, the energy gel, I mean the standard energy gel. And for any geeks out there, effectively you're just looking for the ingredients maltodextrin and fructose and have a look through any energy gel you can find, whether it's the cheapest ones you can buy on ebay or the most expensive ones out there, I guarantee you'll find the same ingredients in there. But the point with those, they are convenient, they are easy to get down. As we've already discussed, they're an age old formula that's never been changed. The problem with them is even before we get into ingredient quality and the long term health downsides of consuming those ingredients, the short term effect, take the gel and tell me, did you experience this? You can literally almost feel the energy. Come on. Do you get that with them?

Yep.

Okay, so it's pretty quick right now that in a way is a benefit. But let's also remember the only time food reacts with you that quickly anywhere else in life is when it's poisoning you. Okay, so boom, you've got your energy. That is good in a sporting context. But what then happens is after that energy, that spike, crash, it was there, it was there, bang, it's gone. Was that something that you experienced as you used them?

Not so much. But I know I have experienced that for sure, not so much during the Ironman. But that's probably because I was conscious of. Well, I said probably. I did actually, because I ended up having to stop basically for the last sort of probably eight miles of the run. I decided it was going to be nil by mouth from here on in because literally that was, that was the only way I was going to get round.

Yeah. And the.

Then I had the crash later on after that.

You get that crash when you either you can't get another one in to perpetuate the cycle or you're riding this spike and crash. So what that will also do as your energy spikes and crashes. Now you can keep taking another gel. And as I referred to earlier, the more you acclimatize your body to taking these, these products, be they gels, drinks or whatever, the more the body requires them. Because effectively what you're doing is you are saying to the body, your fuel source is carbohydrate and the body can store enough carbohydrate for a couple of hours of exercise, whereas we have enough stored fat even in a lean body, say super lean Tour de France cyclist to fuel us for quite literally 24 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours and beyond. The difference comes at the intensity with which you're able to access those two fuel sources. So traditionally we will access will be predominantly burning fat as a fuel below 70% of our exercise level. So call that conversational running pace or cycling pace. And then above that point, we're going to transition into using carbohydrate as our go to fuel. The more you fuel exclusively from carbohydrate, that is your standard energy gels and drinks, the more that threshold between burning fat predominantly and burning carbohydrate predominantly is going to lower. Therefore you're going to require more carbohydrate products because your body is only ever going to be using carbohydrate. That's where there's another disadvantage to the completely carb based product. Whereas when we built our energy gel, it has carbs, it has protein, it has fats, it has fiber, all things that in standard sports nutrition literature they will tell you cannot be done. You cannot have fiber when you are doing an insurance event because it will give you stomach trouble. It's just interesting to note that that message comes from an industry that makes products exclusively without fiber. But what we found in what I think we developed the gel seven years ago, it's been used, I mean, all over the world, multiple endurance events at very high levels. Whether it's professional cycling, whether it's things like the utmb, the Ox Trail du Mont Blanc, Marathon de Saab, London Marathon, Ironman, all over the place. And it was one of the products that Chrissie Wellington, the four time Ironman world champion, that was one of the products that she enjoyed so much that she came to join 33 fuel. So this idea that you can't have fat, you can't have protein in an energy gel is not actually borne out at all in all of our experience and testing and use of the product. So the difference when you use those ingredients, you get the same 100 calorie or so hit and you packet but you get a slower, the energy comes on more slowly. It then does not peak as high, it stays a lot more stable because you're not chucking in this high GI sugar. GI is the glycemic index and sort of how quickly something will spike your blood sugar. Table sugar is around in the 60s I think maltodextrin is up over 100 if I remember rightly. It's going to get in very, very fast. Whereas we use low GI sugars. They come on a little slower, they last longer. It allows your body to not become totally carb dominant, gives you an opportunity to start seeing fat as a fuel. So you improve your ability to use fat. Therefore ultimately you become a more efficient aerobic and distance athlete. And it tails off more slowly as well. So you've got more time to see that it's tailing off and to put something else in whatever you want next. Of course, because it's four natural ingredients that the body recognizes immediately as food. There's not one bit of stomach trouble. That's just not an issue whether you want to go 24 hours, seven days, whatever, just not a problem. We even have customers who say they use them as snacks. They use their unused one as snacks on the way home from the race and you don't really hear that with ordinary gels. Did you get to the end of the Iron man go, oh, I've got a gel left, I'm a bit hungry. I think I have that. No, that doesn't happen. It's a night and day experience. Now before anyone thinks I'm getting too carried away, this gel can't do everything and the one place it doesn't really work is in that ultimate 10 out of 10 effort. When you're there and you're the last hour in and you're trying to hold. We're talking a Tour de France race for the line. Last climb Moments, that's when you need something instant. Right. If you're out at that point, you need something instant that goes down in one, literally one mouthful. But unless you are a professional time trial rider or a world class Tour de France rider and you do have that moment for everyone else and even the elite athletes in 90% of other situations, you'll do a lot better on us. Yeah.

Wow. I mean, I think I'm right in saying it. Scott Jurek described it as the concept that you're talking about as putting. It's the difference between putting paper on a fire and putting wood on a fire. You put paper on the fire, you get this great big flame immediately. But guess what? The fire disappeared in know a minute or two's time. You put wood on the fire, you kind of give you much longer, much better longer fuel. Which is which I always kind of think of when I'm looking at nutrition. So I suppose just being selfish and being more focused on ironmans than ultras, but it kind of incorporates all the training. What would a perfect nutrition strategy look like? Kind of what would you be doing in the, during the training period? What would you be using at the race, how would you be using the race and how would you. And what would you have afterwards?

So I think the key point is to always start food first. Right. Look at your. Kristy Wellington said this so well. She said, you know, my sports nutrition isn't just what I eat on race day, it's everything I eat, you know.

Pasta the night before, I seem to remember.

Or if you go to, if you do go to the Swiss Iron Man. And the translation is slightly off. For the pasta party they were offering noodle fun, Which was not as dodgy as it sounded. It's quite tasty, but no. So look at the quality of what you eat, Bailey. And it's not about, well, everything must be organic or if it's meat, it's got to be grass fed. Always prioritize quality. But look at nutrient density. It's as simple as what's the variety of colors on your plate. Summer's a great time for salads. Like salad, if you're not used to eating, much of it can seem a bit boring. And often it is. When it's just a bit of lettuce and tomatoes that you start throwing in legumes, you start throwing in nuts, you start throwing in seeds, you start throwing in avocado, lots of great olive oil, lemon juice. Well, you can make a whole meal out of that sort of thing. What's the Nutrient density of what I'm eating and so you focus on that good hydration coming into the race. I would definitely recommend that. So yeah, the night before, by all means do, do the pasta party if you want but just don't go crazy if you don't normally eat 10 plates of pasta before you go. Rate training the next day. Don't expect to do it the night before. Rest day and have it work. Have a good meal. You want those carbs stores topped up so your 2 hours of carbs is in there. But that doesn't require you force feeding yourself like some sort of. What's the word? What are those? Come on. The pate, the foie gras pate. You're not a foie gras duck. You're not being forced to end with the pasta. Just eat a bit of it, it's fine. Race morning. So we've got a couple of challenges here, timing breakfast wise. See what the hotel's got if you're traveling for one, but something light and simple, whatever you normally eat. Porridge is a great go to cereal can work, so can toast. Feel free to take things with you. A bit of peanut butter or something like that. Some keep yourself well stocked up. But this is the point where if you're using our products, you put in the elite pre and post workout shake as an ultimate sort of just give your body everything you possibly can. It's not just about your macronutrients, your carbs, it's your micronutrients. What's all the other good stuff that's going in there. So that elite shake sets you up. So by all means have a bit of breakfast, have the elite shake. If you've got a bit of time between then and the race starts then you might want to keep something handy, whether it be a banana, bottle of water, one of our sheer energy gels, just something like that. So if you do need to snack between breakfast and race stuff. Now we're into the race. So we're Ironman with swim. Nothing on the swim. Clearly.

You need to develop something for that. I'm telling you there's a missed opportunity there. Nobody's cracked that market.

Nobody has cracked the Ironman swim gel. Although Luke did a brilliant job. He used ours for open water swimming. They worked out pretty well with it with a carabiner and a line attached to them. That was Luke's own painting device. So from the support boat, Erica was sending them off on a line. Luke would have come back, but that's not going to happen. For you and your Ironman. So get your swim done, come out of the water and we're getting onto the bike now. This is where the bike is a time to feed. Right. And I mean, what were the sort of things that you were using on your bike?

I was having a mixture. So all energy bars. I tended to find that things like the Valle Forte ones and the Chia Charge ones were easily digested but better quality ingredients. So I'd probably have one of those. I think I was having at least one an hour, maybe slightly more than that. But I didn't take the race what the race offered me because I hadn't had them before.

That's a wise move. Did you use any liquid carb or any carb drink?

I did actually, yes, I had. What did I have? I had one bottle which was more electrolyte focused and one one that was carb focused. But yeah, not a fan of those, the energy drinks, if I'm honest. You know that the energy sachets. So literally, I think Ironman and the odd kind of long, long ride is the only time I ever use them.

Now I was exactly the same for the, for the exact same reason in that if you take basically any energy drink carb drink blend, they're the gel ingredients in powder form. So you know sports nutrition company 101, get maltodextrin and fructose, add a little bit of water, that's gel. Get maltodextrin and fructose, add a little bit more water, that's a hydrogel because it's got more water in it. Get those ingredients, leave them on their own, put them in a sachet and add water yourself, that's an energy drink. So if you have problems with gels, you've got problems with energy drinks because the problem is the ingredients. And so for years I'd not done any energy drinks either. Similar to you, I would go for whole food sources. So we got like I use our Chia energy gels, would use Amore energy bars which are a fruit nut blend based on an Italian recipe that they used to fuel Roman Legionnaires with and that we've then adapted the sugars within it for a low GI release. And on top of that we blended in maca, which has been. It's a root from the Andes. Maca has been proven to enhance endurance capacity. This is a good thing to be having on the go. So I used a combination of the gels and the bars. But then as well as that you can bring in energy drink because a bit like you said, you get fatigue during an endurance event. You get fatigue over eating the same thing over and over again. You need variety and be it liquid, be it solid, whatever it may be. And that's where our better fuel energy drink would come in. Because it's an entirely natural carb drink formula, we're getting the majority of the carbohydrate out of ingredients like baobab, which is a really tasty fruit, baobab, pineapple and other things in there, rather than taking it out of something like more podextrium, which not only is it the number two ingredient in a pot noodle, it's also actually a pesticide in its own right. They chuck it on fields to suffocate small bugs. So it's not ideal. If you can avoid that, be great. So blend it up on the bike. But if similar to you, one of the logistical challenges at Ironman is on course nutrition because if you do go down that route, you're going to be using whatever's there. If you're using whatever's there, invariably it's going to be your standard products, it's going to deliver your standard problems. So, you know, maybe what did you use for carrying on the bike? Do you have a bento box or was it on.

I have a bento box and I just had them all in a wrapped up in a rubber band and just stuck them in my pocket and off I went. I did have a midway bag that you could pick up but I only used that for kind of if all of my bars had fallen out. So I didn't actually stop to get that. So I must have carried everything. Yeah, I think I carried everything.

You definitely can. But I think you're right. The midway bag in Ironman is a really handy. Special needs, they call it, isn't it? That's it, yeah. So yeah, special needs bag is a belt and braces and that's a good backup if you've lost anything or also, you know, you might want to. If there's a bit of cake you like or whatever it is, then chuck it in. If you find you're really fancying that thing, well, by all means it's there if you need it. But on the bike I would be going with our. I'd be using a better fuel energy drink at a full strength you can mix it double or half strength. So go full strength in there because you can always get water on the course. Right. So you know, if you need to top up a bottle, I'm not going to be able to get. I'm going to be able to stand a crappy drink, which I don't want, but worst case, I can get water. If I finish one of my bottles, I'm still thirsty. So a couple of bottles on there, bit of bars and our energy gels inside the bento box. Then we come onto the run and this is where the stomach is going to get a slightly harder time. You know, really, you want to fuel that on the bike exactly like you did. You're going to hit the run, the stomach's going to be jiggling around, it's going to be harder to digest. All the blood is going to be diverted into the rest of the body to get you through the rest of the event. You're right. At the end of it, there's not going to be a lot left for digestion, but carrying a camelback or something like that, not going to happen. So all I moved to for that was our energy gels and I fill them up with as much liquid as possible for anyone who wonders what that's all about. The CHEERING Our energy gels, it's all supplied dry to keep all the nutrients intact. You then add water or your mixer of choice to the packet. The gel becomes a gel as the Chia absorbs the water over 10 minutes, and then that product lasts for 24 hours. So clearly in an Ironman, you don't go running around the course making them as you go, you make them in the morning, leave them in your drop bag and those gels are ready to go. Use them like any other gel.

So do they. So have you got a resealable packet for that then?

Yeah, there's a flip top cap on those.

Oh, I see. Oh, okay, great.

So you literally just flip it up, take a little bit, put that, stick it back in your pocket. So you know you're going to need a few of those out on the run. Put them in your belt or whatever it may be, and what you can also do is mix one or two with caffeine. But instead of having to use some sort of processed caffeine, well, make some nice coffee at the hotel in the morning, put that coffee straight into the gel and it will then mix up as the caffeine gel. But don't use the caffeine gel or any caffeine type products until you're into the last couple of hours, because it's also going to be the kind of thing that's going to spike and give you a boost. But I love it. One person, I think it was Ben Greenfield, who explained that when you use caffeine, you're effectively borrowing energy from the future and you're going to have to give that back at some time. So that debt is going to get called in mid race. If you're using it mid race. If you're using at the end, the debt will get called in after the race and you'll be all right. You'll be lying down by then.

That's interesting. I was going to come on to asking you about caffeine because I've noticed there was no caffeine in any of the products. And yeah, I like that you're borrowing energy from the future. I certainly used caffeine on my race, but I only started to use it at the end of the bike. So I kind of wanted to fuel my run using caffeine, but not before.

So.

Yeah, but I think actually that's a great idea because by the point of the run, you're so fed up with sweets. I mean, you know, sweet things. So actually having a coffee flavoured gel as kind of a more. It's coffee savory. I don't know what it is, but it's certainly a different flavor to the usual stuff that you've been consuming. It would make a really nice change.

I think at that point it can really mix it up. And you're right, that whole sweetness in your palate, you just. You wouldn't sit down normally and eat something sweet stuff all day. And it's weird that it would have to be that way in a race. So another thing that can be really good, salted nuts, you know, small, small get freezer bag salted nuts or whatever it is just something like that. Because when you are craving sweet stuff, you're effectively craving carbs. And when you're craving those savories, it's more fats and salts that you need. Right. So. And salted nuts are a great source of that. They're also a really nice antidote to all the sweet that you've been eating. And at that point, if you do need anything else on course, well, there'll always be Coke. It's not a great option, but it's going to get you through. You know, that's there. That's like a get out of jail card. But there's also going to be bananas. So, you know, you're going to get them at any aid station as well. Brilliant.

I think that sounds good advice. And then after the event, you know, immediately afterwards and the day or two afterwards.

What.

Any advice there on nutrition yeah, well.

A big one here is clearly you're going to be hungry and likely my go to is going to be pizza and all sorts of other things like that.

My go to was pizza too.

It's great, right? You've done a lot of work, you've earned it. Get it in. But at the same time, let's go back to the nutrient density food first point. Okay. In an ideal world you'd have a giant salad mixed up with everything and a bit of fruit on the side. You may not be in that situation, you may not want to be. Someone might actually be carrying you back to your hotel by this point. This is where you get another one of our elite pre and post shakes and you use it for the post. It gets in the protein that you need, but you're delivering your body so many more beneficial nutrients to take out the inflammation, to start reducing the soreness, to help your sleep, to maintain your immune function. Put all of that in there. So quite literally you could make their single serve package. You could mix it with water and drink it down. You'd hardly even notice it. If you've got a blender, by all means make it up like a milkshake, but with that base covered, I'd say after that go and eat whatever you like. Right. And then the next morning we're in the same point, it's back to that thing. Put another elite pre and post workout shake in because the body has just taken a hammering and eat whatever you like and then repeat that for the next day. But make sure through all those days when you finish that you do also stay well hydrated. And that's just good old water. Because if you're eating well and drinking water, there's your recovery right there. And it's really only the point where those are elite pre and posts come into it. That's a real race weekend thing when you're turning everything up to 10 and 11, that's where they're coming in for the recovery. But you have to enjoy your food and your recovery as well and, you know, go for your life at that.

Yeah, I think that's great advice because you. Yeah, I mean certainly that the compulsion of the pizza was a significant factor. Towards the end of the Ironman. I was looking forward to sitting down, actually. They completely messed up my order. I mean, bearing in mind I was doing Ironman Italy. You'd like to think they could get pizza pretty well down. And the first pizza that came out was completely down. The wrong pizza, the second came out and they put peppers on instead of pepperoni on. I was like, oh do you know what? I don't care anymore. I'm just gonna eat. I've got this pizza in my head that I. But I did have a recovery shake. I'm not sure it was. I know for a fact it wasn't.

As good as the one that you're talking about.

But I didn't think about having it in the days afterwards as well actually because you know you have, you have massively depleted lot of elements in your, in your body, haven't you? So I think that's, that's great advice and I suppose just kind of wrapping this up. Are there any books or any particular resources that you would recommend or have you found really valuable or that you kind of often give that you think have been really powerful on that on your kind of road to learning more about nutrition in training?

So I mean in terms of the nutrition and training stuff, there are trying to think. I mean the majority of our stuff has all been self research from so many sources that it's hard to pin down one specific book. A good entry point in fact approach. So the early starting points would be Rich rolls finding out rich roles, Finding Ultra and Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.

Yeah brilliant books.

Two really strong places to start putting, putting this theory into practice and certainly both very early influences on Erica, myself, Dan and what we originally did at 33 with the point that, you know, this nutritional journey which was a lot of the ingredients and things you'd read about, the more focused on a health perspective was actually even more applicable when you got to serious performance and particularly in the endurance space, they kind of really put those things together. And the more we've looked at it since health and performance are exactly the same thing, you know, you don't run very fast when you've got a cold.

Yeah, you're right. I think Rich Roll is to blame for me actually doing triathlons at all. I was reading Finding Ultra, I was already cycling and I was like, well what's going to be next year's challenge? And yeah, so he's to blame for me getting into all of this. But yeah, great books. And what about what's your, what's, what are your goals for the future? You know what Both from a business point of view and also from a personal point of view. You know, what are you aiming for?

So I think the, from a business point of view it's changing the sports nutrition industry for the better. There's not even at the elite level, there's not a practitioner we meet who, who doesn't say, you know, we operate, it's got to be food first, that, that is where we start. And yet even at the elite level, supplementation is dominated by food last products. And so our mission is changing that and benefiting the health and performance of athletes everywhere. Because when you do get the fuel link right, and when it is from quality natural sources, you enjoy your race more and being able to not only make people happier on race day, but make them perform better and make them healthier long term because they're not compounding the negative sides of, you know, multiple consumption. Things that are really not very good for you if you can do that. That is the driving mission that gets us out of bed every morning. So scaling that and continuing to scale it, both at the elite world class level and at the serious amateur level, that's exactly. That is the business mission. Personally, I think it's just an evolving journey into fitness life and business. Because after so much endurance, I'm almost looking now at sort of shorter, faster and working on strength than everything else. Because it's probably, yes, it's over 10 years since I sort of really got back into some sort of shape again. And it's just never. The journey doesn't ever stop. And I long ago realized that fitness is a lifelong skill. You know, this isn't it's about being fast today, but it's also about being able to get yourself out of a chair when you're 95 or whatever. You know, that's the difference between being at home and being in a home. So it's just continuing that journey and enjoying it because being able to do as you would understand, being able to do a job that you love, being able to do things that you love, being able to help people and benefit them as you do that and being able to do that scale, it's very, very rewarding. But you also have to remember that work is not everything. You have to enjoy your life while you're at it.

And I think that whole point of, you know, this is a longevity exercise, isn't it? And trying to make, you know, create the best life possible and the longest life possible is a really a great point. And that kind of leads me nicely on the one final question is how did the whole Tony Robbins thing help you and Erica?

It helped us massively. So as I said before, for people who aren't familiar with Tony Robbins, he certainly falls into the bracket of self help guru. He does it at very serious scale. But some people might Think, well that's a bit weird, what you need help for. You must be something wrong with you. I was initially of that mindset and so was Erica. But the more we looked at it, the more we found that the most successful people we knew were all open to this kind of learning. And many of them had in fact been down the Tony Robbins path. And it was one that resonated with us. It just allowed us to break down, break out our goals and ambitions and set a framework for them, but also to identify in the same way that running the marathon to Saabe and having to train for it had made me identify those things, unknowingly identify the things in our lives and our behaviors that were helping us get to where we wanted to go. The first of all, we were able to really define our goals of where we want to go. Then we were able to break down the behaviors that were helping us and do more of that, but also break down the behaviors that we realized weren't helping us and get tools to remove those. So you know, you're just improving all the bits you want to improve but within a dedicated framework. And I have to say the, yeah, the framework that he outlines in his book and I think the book is unleashed because the events unleash the power within. But I'm pretty sure the book is it Awaken the Giant within or Unleash the power Within.

Awaken the Giant.

Awaken the Giant. That's it. And again, if anyone's not familiar with his work, this is going to sound proper woo woo nonsense out there. But just yeah, you, there's nowhere that we don't expect to need training and coaches if we want to get better. And Tony Robbins work was one of the key influences for Eric and I and sort of really pushing us down that journey to work harder on ourselves as people and our skills in business and life.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. It had massive transformational effect on Carol and I and you know, from a health point of view but also from a work life balance point of view from, you know, from so many, so many aspects and you know, as they say, even, you know, all the best people in the world, whether it be Tiger woods, whether we, Chris Froome, they have a coach. So you know, it's just about coaching you into kind of getting into creating the best life you possibly can. But it is, it did feel a bit like joining you join the occult at the start but boy was it worth it. So anyway, so I was just interested to hear how you found It. Warren, it's been absolutely fascinating. I could chat to you all day on this stuff, but we kind of dived into some bits that really interested me and there's loads of great advice in there as well for people. So a massive thank you for being a part of this. And yeah, if you want to find more, then I suggest you go and check out 33. There's loads of really valuable advice there and I for one will be trying out these products to see if they're as good as you. So they are.

We'll get some out to you. Charlie. Charlie, Real, real pleasure catching up and really excited with what you're doing with triathlon. But also, I say it was there was that side. But also the more I learned about your business background and your own journey, I thought we absolutely had to pick up because there was so much in common. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for, thanks for the invite. Brilliant.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm sure you'll agree Warren is an absolute wealth of knowledge when it comes to endurance nutrition. And there was so much to take from that. I know I've learned a huge amount and as I say, I hadn't tried the 33 fuel products when I spoke to Warren, but since have and now using them regularly, really love their energy bars and their gels and their shakes. Really, really good products. And actually the daily greens stuff I find to be a brilliant mix as well. I'll add into smoothies and the like. So check them out@33fuel.com. I hope you got huge amounts of value from from listening to that conversation with Warren. I know I did. And until the next time, keep on training. Don't Forget to check out 33fuel.com if you want to get faster, fitter and healthier through their incredibly high quality, health conscious, endurance nutrition. And if you use the discount code TA33, you'll be able to get a 10% discount. So that's capital T, capital A3, three the numbers. And you'll get a 10% discount off your order@33fuel.com you won't be discounted. Disappointed. This podcast is brought to you by Innovate.com incredible running shoes that keep Damien hall and Nikki Spinks, amongst others, flying along the trails. If you go to innovate.com that's in O V-8.com and if you use the discount code Tribeathlon 10, that's Tribathlon in all capitals 10, you can get 10% off off your purchase@innovate.com I know you will love their shoes. In particular, I love the Terra Ultras. So go check out innovate.com and don't forget to download the Tribathlon app for more amazing podcasts, but also to help you train, compete and to build your tribe.

SA.