The Art of Endurance: Insights from Adventure Racer Ian Adamson

Foreign.

I'm charlie redding.

And I'm claire fudge and this is.

The tribe athlon podcast.

Not one incidence in the scientific literature of people dying from dehydration during an athletic competition. It's never happened.

That was Ian Adamson and this episode is the Art of Endurance Insights from an Adventure Racer. Ian Adamson is a world renowned endurance athlete, event director, producer and also a published author. He accumulated 10 world championship wins, 25 world championship podium finishes and gold, silver and bronze medals at the ESPN X Games. Ian is a six time Guinness World Record holder, one of which was for kayaking 262 miles in 24 hours and is a current Ninja World record holder. Ian was a founding member of Team Nike which won over 100 championship races and featured on the Eco Challenge, Primal Quest and other TV show competitions. He has three decades working in medical school, sports and outdoor product industries, is the President of World Obstacle and works as a legal forensic expert. Quite an amazing cv. So Claire and I got the chance to chat to Ian about the different formats of adventure racing, a world of endurance sport that don't really know that much about. We also chatted to him about the top adventure races around the world, some of which just sound incredible and then also fueling for multi day endurance events and how to deal with sleep when you're racing that long. So this is an incredible guy and an incredible interview with one which I know you're going to enjoy. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Ian Adamson. How would you like to grow your business whilst working less and enjoying your work life more? Well that's how we help people at the Trusted Team. We do that through workshops which happen in person and online. We do that through regular online learning that you can just do from your desk at lunchtime and we do it through in person events that make fun tax deductible things like golf days, dinners, wine tasting, all of that fun stuff. They help you build stronger relationships and enjoy work more. So if you want to know how we can help you grow your business and improve your work life balance, go to thetrusted team to find out when our next free taster event or free webinar is so that you can find out how we get can help you grow your business and get your work life balance back. That's thetrusted team. Come join us at one of our events.

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So, Ian, welcome to the Tribathlon podcast. I feel, I feel like this is an episode where I'm going to be completely out of my depth. I know very little about your sport, but it feels like it's kind of, it doesn't feel a million miles off the world of endurance support that we know much better. So I feel like we need, you need to come at this from, from very much a beginner's angle, but I'd like to kick these podcasts off with understanding the story behind the athlete. And you have an incredible CV of, of achievements through a multitude of different sports. But how did you find your way into the world of endurance sport and particularly then obstacle racing?

Oh, gosh, yes. Well, that is a long story, so I'll try and keep it brief. I was an athlete. I had the Olympic dream from a very, very young age. There was two things I really wanted to do as a kid. One was being an Olympian and the other one was getting the Guinness Book of World Records because I would pour over that and look at people swallowing goldfish and juggling cats and I mean, just stuff that were really, you know, I thought there was something there for me, whatever it was. And that started as long as I can remember. So probably when I was, you know, four or five, I was browsing books and watching the games and I had that kind of thing going. So I would, I was a distracted athlete. I would try everything. I love, I still do. I just love competing. I love sport in every manner, whether it's cornhole in the United States or cricket or football. You name it, I just love it. My grandfather was a national federation president for football. He was actually Scottish. He competed for Scotland as a young lad in about, I'm going to say it was about 1916, somewhere around then. Immigrated to Australia, became head of the Australian Soccer Football Federation. So kind of knew the world by association. But you know, as a kid I had really knew nothing about it. And my grandfather would have endless stories about marathoners and all these amazing athletes. So that was kind of the environment I grew up in. My dad was a Very good cyclist. My brother and sister were talented athletes, way more than me. So I just played at everything. And that would be, you know, all through high school it was swimming and track and field and volleyball and football and rugby and every. Anything goes. By the time I got to university it was a little more. I was a little more focused because now I was thinking about maybe I could actually be good at something. Maybe by the end of university I was pretty deep in canoe and kayak. I'd stopped playing. I'd been a soccer ref and coach and player at a moderate level, which was fun, but then sort of got into the canoe thing and then eventually made an Australian team. But along the way I was still doing other stuff, cycling because my dad cycled. So I started cycling competitively as a young age grouper. I think I was 11 when I truly started competing. And what that ended up creating was an athlete that you would typically see in a triathlon if they're good enough. And so I was good enough to compete in the early days in triathlon to about like 1984 to complete, you know, in a, I don't know, top 10% I suppose, but not good enough to be truly competitive. And then I was also a kayaker and I was quite a good navigator because I was a sailor as well. I mean you can see what's going on here. I had too many sports and that is not conducive to being particularly good at anything, even the multi sport stuff. Australia at the time were very, very good triathletes, maybe even today. So people like Brad Bevin back in the day and these guys were competing while world champions competing at world level. And so I really didn't have a prayer of making a team in triathlon, in canoe a bit better, but still not good enough to make a games. And that led to actually adventure racing of all things, which is kind of anything goes. So the more you're competent at, the better you tend to be. Challenge there of course is there was no money to speak of. That's not quite true. There was back in the 80s you could win cars and things. By the time I immigrated to the US in 1991 as an engineer of all things. I was a biomedical engineer. I was working in a heart peacemaker company and I saw my opportunity to move to Boulder, Colorado with the big dogs in endurance competitions, especially multi sports. So tons of triathletes here at that time and in San Diego that then led to a professional career as an adventure athlete by coincidence, I suppose. No, it's not coincidence. It was more timing. And there was a period when there was a sport called adventure racing which was pretty big. Well, not pretty big, it was huge. There were global, there was World Cups, there were full time professional athletes. I was one of them. And you could win. Even back then, six figure incomes for the top athletes were not uncommon. We were earning a lot more than triathletes at the time. In fact, almost any other. In fact, all endurance athletes. No one was earning more than us. And that was driven by television. There was a TV show back in the day called the Eco Challenge, which was sort of global and that allowed advertising, sponsorship and professional athletes. And I was one of those that went away. I'd met Bob around that time. My agent was a guy called Murphy Reinshriver is actually a guy called Murphy Reinshaber and he also managed Paul Newby Fraser and Greg Welch and a whole bunch of us old school athletes, endurance athletes. So I was in pretty good company. Heather Fuhr, I mean, it goes on and on and on. Many of them, like Paul Huddle and Rock Fry are still in, I believe still in triathlon, I think in Europe managing Ironman, at least last I checked. So we, we were sort of colleagues under the same umbrella. And that's where I met Bob. Bob Babbitt, terrific gentleman, one of my favorite guys on earth. Fun, jolly great interview. And that then led full circle. I went through all sorts of things. I tried to retire myself. How about that? I tried to retire unsuccessfully as an adventure racer because I thought I would last about three years if I was lucky. So my exit strategy was all right, I don't think I'll last very long competing. Maybe I can help organize. So then I coincidentally got a job offer. Maybe not so coincidentally. It was actually Murphy Reintraber offered me a job working on one of the events that he was producing called the Outdoor Quest. And that was a wealthy event. I think they gave out 1.6 million in prize money over time. So it was pretty good. We, you know, earning good money, 200,000 a race, which is decent money. But I switched from. I'd unsuccessfully competed in it. Well, came second three times. How about that? And then got to the. Went to the other side, which was event production. So I worked for Murphy and his team. I was originally the course and technical director for the event and then started working with the TV guys. And over that, one thing led to another and I became an event producer and television producer for endurance shows. And that gave me my exit strategy. Except I kept racing for another Seven years. So I was doing both. And then I finally did give it up. I retired in 2007 after my seventh World Championship win in adventure racing. As I thought, hey, good enough for Lance Armstrong, good enough for me. Maybe not company in the world, but still, no. Lance is a great guy. I like him a lot. So that then I slid into the event production. Did that full time for a while and television created an event called 24 Hours of Triathlon. Actually 8 hours and 24 hours of triathlon, which I believe is still going on. Did that, built it from zero to pretty good in about four years. Then gave it away to a charity. Then started working the shoe industry because I've been sponsored by Nike and Salmon over a period of about 15 years. Then started producing shoes at Newton Running Company. Did that for seven years. Friend of mine, Joe Decenter, it's a long story. Told you. Friend of mine, Joe Decenter and I met racing the Eco challenge in the 90s. He had started Spartan Race, which became pretty big, now globally dominant, and we'd stayed in touch and I actually produced his first race in 2001, which was Expedition BVI, British Virgin Islands. Sailed around on yachts and did fun things and went to nice places. So he kept calling me, stayed in touch, and he said eventually he started Spartan Race and I kind of got back involved. And by 2013, he had this idea to take Spartan racing to the Olympics. That was his idea. So. And he said, Ian, you're the guy. Actually was a girl, a lady called Colleen, another friend of ours who had worked on Expedition bvi. And so I was intrigued and said, okay. So I consulted for a year to Spartan Race to see if it was possible to create a sport and go to the Games. It is about the general. So I kind of reconnecting with all my old colleagues. I was talking to the triathletes and people like Paul and Rock and Paula, and they said, yeah, I mean, it's always possible, but it takes a while. And I was talking to guys, which is Sport Accord, which is kind of the. One of the regulatory bodies that assist sports becoming sports. And the general consensus was it's not impossible, but probably takes about 50 years, if ever. Or to never is actually it's 50 years to never. I mean, how many people actually create a sport and then make it successful? So by 12, by a year in, I said to Joe, look, you probably don't want to do this. Here's the reasons. You have a brand that's very successful. Be like Ironman, be the dominant brand, have a successful, profitable commercial business, let the sport emerge and evolve over time because otherwise you're going to have to dismantle your business and become a non profit run by, you know, the people because it's buying for the athletes. So it becomes a democratic process as a nonprofit and you can't, that's not going to help you as a business. So he said, okay, fine. We went, we kind of dropped it at that point. But pretty quickly I was getting calls from other sports saying we hear you've been making noise about this obstacle thing. And I said yes. And they said, well, we're sort of interested in talking to you about what could happen. And the triathlon colleague, my triathlon colleagues had said it's not a bad idea. And here's one possible way to do it is you start working with other sports and you see this as quite common. Actually. If you look at athletics, aquatic, cycling, canoe, they bring sports in that get on the Olympic program over time. In canoe, as an example, you have stand up paddling which has a foot in surf and a foot in canoe. And the canoe version is racing. It's the same in cycling. You saw things like mountain biking come in 96 and BMX and these other things start to join in the existing federations. Same with athletics. Over time, trail running, mountain running, these things start to join the other international federations. So I was thinking at that point, oh well, maybe there is a way to do this. Fast forward nine years to now and successfully created the organization spent the most the previous seven or eight years building the governance structure because that's critical and that builds the, you know, all the stuff that a sport needs to make it safe, fair, cheap and accessible, which is what the athletes want. They don't care about the international federations. I mean they really, most triathletes really don't know what world triathlon is. To be honest, many athletes in swimming, aquatics, the swing people, many of them even Olympians are not really that familiar with what FINA is because it doesn't really bother them that much. Like, hey, I just want to compete, I want a good race. So you see this in many sports and that's the same in obstacle. People go, you're not doing anything. What's going on? Why do you even need that? Well, it turns out you actually do for many, many, many reasons. One, the athletes need to be represented by themselves, buy and for the athletes and they like things to be safe, fair, cheap and accessible. And that's, you know, that's actual sport. Just you Know competition rules for fairness and anti doping and good structure and all the stuff that sports actually need. But athletes don't know that and they really don't care until they get hurt or it costs too much or you know, stuff that they really care about, which makes sense. So here we are and that's how I got into obstacle. So now I'm the president of the World World Obstacle, the federation international sport obstacles just like the other ones. And we got approved by GUICE at the time, which means that the sports, all of them, because it's a unanimous vote, approved World obstacle to govern ninja competitions, obstacle course racing and adventure racing. And how do we. Brilliant.

And how do we define between those? What is an adventure race versus an obstacle race versus a ninja race?

Oh, well, good question. We'll look at it like fina. We'll start at the structural side. Fina, World Aquatics. I think this World Aquatics now that's the international federation that provides all of the sports stuff for the aquatic sports. And the aquatic sports are swimming, diving, high diving, artistic swimming, water polo, open water swimming or, or marathon swimming I think they call it now. So they're the sports within aquatics and they are common in that they are aquatic based sports. They're in water. Canoe is different, that's on water and you see the same thing. You've got lots of stuff. Sprint, marathon, canoe, kayak, slalom, wild water, ocean paddling, stand up. And then there are canoe sports. Right. So it's kind of like that. So in, in the obstacle world ninja competitions. Here you go. That is a ninja competition. So that's our world champs from 2019. Today we build these ninja warrior style rigs that look just like the television show Ninja Warrior which be familiar to UK viewers or most viewers in the world. Now viewers in 160 countries for that matter are quite familiar with this. There's about a billion people watch watch it on television. Now that's the entertainment show. So we work with the IP holders for the TV shows and we create an event that is a true pure competition with actual competition rules. And it's an actual race that looks just like the television shows. And that is a ninja competition. It's basically obstacles. A lot of them are hanging obstacles. What I mean like hanging off something. Um, and it's a head to head race competition. There's various competitions within the sport but the one that we're focusing on at the moment is a race. The one behind me was quite big, bit bigger than, well, considerably bigger than a hundred meter course. And you can see the crowd is quite big. That was about a hundred thousand people over a few days. So quite a few people like to watch it. So that's Ninja. Obstacle course racing is running based, so it's running with obstacles. Run obstacle, run obstacle. Another UK very familiar UK athletes because in the modern context it came out of England. It's a British sport at its roots, actually Dutch as well. Because there's another race in parallel competition called Survival. Orange is quite similar but the one that people do today looks a lot like tough guy. And tough guy is a guy called Mr. Mouse, quite famous in, in the OCR world who in the 1980s created a competition that is pretty much how it looks today in the mud run space, which is obstacles and running with a lot of mud. The way we do it, we don't have mud. We might have mud, but it's incidental or it's an obstacle then and we have to be clean so you can't obscure numbers and a few other things. We like to be clean. So that's difference and that creates cultures. And in the uk obstacle course racing tends to be quite muddy. I mean the weather helps if you want a muddy race. Running through, running through farmland and stuff, which is very common, you do tend to get quite muddy and that's part partly to do with the environment. So that's obstacle course racing, running with obstacles. And there's within each sport because they are sports, they're separate think different distances and disciplines and just like athletics. So in athletics you've got lots of disciplines, 12 or something, jumps, throws, sprints, marathon. There's all these different sport, sport disciplines within athletics, within obstacle course racing. We have 100 meters. Looks very much like Ninja, except it's much faster as you run. Then you've got like 400 meters, 800 meters, 3k, 5k, 10k, 15k, 21k, 42k, 24 hour. These are disciplines, these are sport events of obstacle course racing. And then adventure racing is different again. French racing's been around internationally since about 1989. Started with the French race before that in other ways, mostly in Australia and New Zealand. So in the 70s, but in the modern context it evolved out of an event called the regular Watts 1989 French race put on in New Zealand and that then was the actual parent of most of the races you see today. However, there was a strange and unusual phase when adventure racing was huge and they had sprint adventure races which you don't really see today. Sprint adventure races were very, very big. They were quite short. Well like two to three hours, but very quite short. And they looked a little bit like a triathlon with obstacles and quite often more like an X terror with obstacles, manufactured obstacles, walls, crawls, nets, ropes, ninja grips. They had all these things in these races and they were big. They'll cut them off at 900 people and they'd fill national series and they were nationally televised in the US at least. Lots and lots of prize money. So those were. They were actually obstacle races but with other stuff that you don't see today. And that existed for about 10 years and that was typically mountain bike, canoe running, maybe orienteering and obstacles. And that was sprint adventure racing. A lot of people today don't even really know it existed, but it was the biggest thing actually in adventure racing today. Adventure racing looks like a. More like a long journey where you have a map and compass, you navigate your way through all sorts of stuff. Could be urban, suburban, typically wilderness. And you just find your way around and find checkpoints like orienteering and that's, that's kind of the common adventure racing today.

And in a, you know, in a world where. So I think triathlon is losing quite a few people to like, whether it's ultramarathons, whether it's audax riding, you know, there's more. I don't know, almost. We were interviewing one of the organizers of, of the Outlaw or the organizer of the Outlaw series of triathlons in the uk. He was saying, you know, all of his mates are going off and doing other things and that's why he's struggling to fill events more. Can you give us an example of an incredible like. Like the marathon day, samples of, of adventure racing. That would be the sort of iconic one that people might go to if they were looking to expand their horizons.

Sure. Godzone in New Zealand.

I'm liking the sound of that already. So tell us about that.

It's the, it's a contraction for God's own country and. But it's actually spelled G O D Z O Z O N E God Zone. So it's. It was created by Warren Bates from England. He immigrated to New Zealand and he was a world champion adventure racer from probably maybe after the end of my career. So maybe in the two around like let's say 2010, something like that. So he created Godzone as an event that truly represented the, the culture and ethos of adventure racing. And he did a very good job. It would be. I regard it, and I think many do regard it as the best adventure race. It's beautiful. New Zealand where in New Zealand is it? Last year, North Island.

Oh, okay. So it moves around.

It moves around, yeah. Okay. This is an interesting history because the regal was in 1989 when it first created what we know as expedition racing or adventure racing. It stayed in New Zealand. One of the raft guides on the Rakawas, a guy called Jeff Hunt, borrowed loosely. I say borrowed, but he replicated almost exactly. Well, it was exact. He did an exact replica of the regulars and kept it in New Zealand because the rays started moving around. It went New Zealand and then I'm going to say Madagascar, Costa Rica. I just went all over the place. All over the world. For almost 30 years. He kept it and called it the Southern Traverse because the original ray was called the Grand Traverse or Lagrange. So he kept it as the sudden reverse in New Zealand. Exactly the same rules and format. And then Mark Burnett, another British guy everywhere, he replicated it. He got a license from the French company from a guy called Giraffe Uzi and he called it the Eco Challenge. So he had a license for North America. And then he quickly reneged on that and changed the format a little bit to get around the IP and went from five people on a team with two support, so seven in the full team down to four, which was much more practical. That format sort of stuck and Subdiverse borrowed it as well, but subdivision stuck with the five, and then they added three and two. And so this whole thing stayed in New Zealand. Godzone is pretty much like. It is actually like a great grandchild of the regulars, I think all of the. But what we call expedition races, they really are. So Godzone, that's the one. Do that. It's fantastic.

How long does that event. Event last? So if you were to go and do Godsend, do you have to qualify? Do you need to be. Have a certain experience in certain areas? Like what does it. What does it look like if you. If somebody wanted to go and do it? How does it work?

Yeah, that's like another good question. Adventurous is kind of a loose sport. It's sort of the nature of it. It's kind of terrific in many ways. A little bit like obstacle racing, but more so in adventure racing, there's no set format or rules. You can do whatever you want to do. And it varies. There's been urban races and city races and then truly wilderness expeditions where you cross lots of countries. I did races where you cross three countries. Map and compass. And they'll be very long. Some of them would be a couple of weeks. Godzone Is anyone can do it. There's categories, there's basically two categories. There's the people who have experience and they can do these things. Meaning you have. You're probably going to go for five to seven days probably. I think the winners typically are four to five days or maybe a bit longer and then the back of the pack. I don't know what the cutoffs are. Typically would be 10 days. Typically. I don't know for sure in this event if they go that long. There's costs. Of course, if you have a race course open for 10 days, that's very expensive. So I. Maybe it's a week. Let's just call it a week because that's usually about what people can take in time. Considering a week of competition with weekends either end, that's about 10 days. So that gives you ability to get to start, get organized through the competition. Wrap it up. So it's about a week and is.

That made up of running? Kayaking. So what, what would you do in.

That race in New Zealand? It is. Would be more like rogaining. Well, maybe not. You're using map and compass, put it that way. So land navigation.

Right.

And then kayaking could be rafting as well. Like whitewater rafting. We're definitely kayaking. They have very highly developed kayaks in New Zealand over the past 40 years they've developed these very, very fast boats specifically for adventure racing. So those will be in the race. You need to rent, borrow big or steal those when you go to New Zealand. Mountain biking and probably something with ropes. That's quite common. Maybe mountaineering terrain is conducive to all these things. Depending where you are. If you go to south island, obviously there's glaciers and high mountains and things that true mountaineering, the weather can be is varied and aggressive. So depending on time of year you might see anything from quite hot conditions in parts of the country to blizzards, strong winds and torrential rain. Part of the beauty of the country. It's like. It's a lot like the west coast of Norway. In many places there's fjords and steep terrain and mountains that go to the ocean. So this is what makes news if. If you haven't been to New Zealand, it's absolutely terrific. Maybe one of the most the place.

For adventures certainly, isn't it?

It is for sure one of the most beautiful countries on earth. If you like beautiful wilderness and friendly people and good food, that's great.

It's like Scotland on steroids, but with slightly better weather.

Very much like Scotland before They cut the trees down.

And did you say that was a team of four that would do that particular race?

Yes, in that race it's team of four with a support crew or logistics crew. I think it's sort of unlimited there. It makes it quite hard to compete as a foreign athlete because you need to get a local support team. Right. It's very difficult to waltz in there bringing your own team because vehicles knowing where to drive and basic stuff like that. I've competed in New Zealand a few times, successfully won a couple of times, which is I think the only team to ever do it. Like foreign team. It's very hard to win in New Zealand against Kiwis for many, many reasons. One, they're absolutely fantastic athletes at this and then two, there's all sorts of things. Like most countries, if you compete on someone else's turf, it's home field advantage and it's a big one in New Zealand.

That does sound like.

Because you get to compete against the best. And, and I actually mean it like I think the best athletes are out of New Zealand consistently. Doesn't mean there aren't others that will win out of other countries. But these days it's Kiwis tend to dominate.

It does sound like an amazing race. One for the bucket list for sure. I think that sounds like a really exciting race to do. You've got an incredible CV of a whole wide range of different world championships and world records and all sorts. Can you just pick out one that is your highlight of your kind of competitive career that you can, you can tell us about why it was. Why that was the highlight.

First thing that comes to mind, 2006 Adventure Racing World Championships. Started in and finished in Norway and went. So I apologize start and finished in Sweden and went through Norway. It was my last race and when I, when I retired I kind of knew I was going to retire. I just hoped it was on a high note, which it was. And I'm not an athlete who, I'm not someone who'll just keep going back to something. So I, I wanted to have a good race. We had a great team. It included a guy called Gosh, Richard Usher. I think even today he has the fastest ever Ironman by kiwi. Like seven hours. I can't remember 7:50 something and Roth. So he'd just come off setting the fastest ever Kiwi time for Iron Man. So he was quite fit. He's also an Olympian in, in skiing. We, we had master who just beaten Lance Armstrong at the, the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race. He came from the finish line. His. His wife, Susan demattei, dragged him from the finish line where he would normally stop, stand and shake everyone's hand as the winner because he won it, like nine times. So he was on our team. And then we had a world champion exterior athlete, Monique Morel. She'd won and she. She was one of these athletes, said, oh, it wasn't that good. I mean, they were. Everyone else was having an off day, but she still won. So everyone on the team was a world champion and Olympian, or Olympian and. Or Olympian. And we came together. We'd never raced together. We knew each other well because we had raced in bits and pieces, but we had this really talented team. And Dave Wiens is the mountain Biker World cup guys, a very, very good one. And he got diverted by the bomb scare in London. Oh, it was actually. I think it was an actual bomb in London. This is 2006. He almost didn't make the start line because he got diverted from going through London anyway. But we finally got to the start. We were going to teach him how to do ropes. He'd never done ropes. So we had to do it on the fly during the competition anyway, so we had great team. We were having a lot of fun. We were crossing the Arctic Circle in August.

Wow.

Right before my birthday. It was kind of late. I don't know if it was late or early, but there were the northern lights. It was great. There was these beautiful curtains of green light all over the place. Not quite dark, but not quite light. There had been storms, so there was a sort of rainbow going on, which was really bizarre because there was enough light coming over the horizon to light up a rainbow. There were shooting stars. Happened to be some sort of meteor shower. And then we were accompanied in our kayaks by orcas. So all this stuff was going on. And you get pretty loopy sometimes in these races, but you don't quite sleep enough. And we were. We were pretty far in the lead at that point. And so we were. There's all this stuff going on. I'm looking around and kind of leaning on, hey, guys, is this real? Are we seeing all this stuff? You seeing what I'm seeing? I'm not sure this is real or not. And they're saying, yeah, this is real. I mean, this is crazy stuff. Like, imagine the best possible scenario of something that you could. That's like a dream. It was an actual dream. Like, all this stuff's happening. I go, oh, my gosh, this is crazy. But I did think at that Point. Oh, yeah, we're getting a bit sleep deprived. We are actually hallucinating, which we were not. But I was concerned that we might. So we were a team that slept a lot. People don't know this. We would tell them, hey, yeah, you know how to win Sleep more. Even today they do the opposite. They go, oh, if we're not sleeping. No, if we're sleeping, people are passing us, which is not true, really. Anyway, so my team, like most teams, were pretty resistant to the idea of taking big sleep, especially being in the lead, whereas I have the opposite opinion, which is, well, it's backed up by data, but sleep more and will win. So I said, we had this discussion about how much to sleep, being in the lead. Didn't want to get past saying, okay, well, it starts at like, we need eight hours sleep. That's me. And then team says 10 minutes. So the negotiation ends up at something like, okay, we'll take 30, 30 minutes, that's plenty. But I know full well as a sports medicine guy that that is absolutely not enough. You need to get rest, then recovery, then repair, then you can race again. So. And that takes at least four hours. So I set my watch for, okay, I'll set it for 30 minutes. And I set it for six hours. And yeah, it's not quite dark and it's not quite light. So you're not quite sure. I think at that point it was light. So you're not quite sure if it's day or night. So we found a little heart, found a little island, found a little heart, went to sleep, got up again a few hours later. My team was like, oh, we feel great. That was a great 30 minute nap. And off we went, not knowing that I had several hours. And then off we went. And they kind of dawned on them as we're going along that, oh, maybe we slept more than we thought. And then they were getting kind of motivated. It's like, oh, I pissed off at Ian now. So we got to the transition area out of the kayaks into onto a land navigation section and we'd gone from first to eighth and they were pissed off and highly motivated. So job done, Ian, well done. So off we went and within an hour we passed every other team and that's how fast you go when you sleep. And after that the game was over. Because we had slept so much at that point and every other team hadn't because they were trying to catch us and hadn't slept. We just had a whole days. In my opinion, we were now whole day ahead which we actually were by the finish. So that's, that was a, that was a terrific race. Beautiful. Oh my gosh, it was gorgeous. Norway and Sweden are like New Zealand. Just delightful.

Well, I mean that, that would definitely, that would, you know, those sorts of experience would sell it to most people wouldn't. I mean that just sounds absolutely incredible. But, but it's also interesting how I know this is a big debate with ultra runners, you know, you know, in multi day races do you, how much do you sleep? And, and yet we've had a good friend of ours, Kerry Sutton came on here and, and said basically she was winning the the spine race and then as a result of not sleeping she ended up having to get pulled off the cliff face having made stupid decisions but that she wouldn't have made had she wasn't so tired. So, so absolutely, that makes, makes a lot of sense.

Lack of, lack of sleep is dangerous and very, very unhealthy. You accumulate plaque in your brain which only gets cleaned out. It's kind of like atherosclerosis in your heart. It only gets cleaned out with sleep. The, the science has finally caught up with it. We will, we were looking at Air Force studies to see what they were doing to operate. You know, stuff that can blow up the world carrying weaponry that was incredibly deadly. How do they do it so they don't blow up the wrong thing or you know, or die or crash or whatever. And there the data out of the air forces is quite good. So we followed that as a general rule. Which was the general rule being if you don't get at least four hours of actual sleep in the 24 hour period, it gets incredibly dangerous and very, very unhealthy. In fact, if you keep yourself awake and they did this in horrible, nasty war clinical studies with prisoners, they die. If you don't sleep enough, you will die. And it's quite quick and it takes, I think it's about a week for some people will die without actual sleep.

Yeah, I think you die quicker from a lack of sleep than you do from a lack of food, don't you?

Much quicker. Yeah. You can go for, you can go for a very long time without food. Yeah, but you will die I think the world record for, in the Guinness world record for sleeping where they actually nap so they're not truly staying awake the whole time is many, many, many days. But that's not, you know, it's like in a rocking chair, kind of eyes open but sort of napping. You can't actually stay awake. In fact I had such bad long term problems from prolonged lack of sleep over about 20 years of racing that my memory had completely disintegrated. For short term I couldn't remember things. I couldn't. Fortunately, our brains are plastic and you can repair them. Took me about five years to repair my brain. My wife was quite concerned and many of our spouses were concerned about the cognitive problems that we were having from lack of sleep. And we were highly motivated because we were chasing. I had a, I had a very solid seven figure career in racing so financially was successful but health wise it was damaging and that was one reason I decided to quit. It's like I've had enough faces. I will die if I keep doing this. That's what I thought. I was probably right, probably would have made a dumb mistake and died. But you know the cognitive problems are real and that's like the RAM people doing ram. The data does not support what the practice is which is not sleeping doesn't support it. We looked at doing RAM at one point but there's no money in it. So we didn't. But we looked doing it as a team and ran the numbers on speed and sleep and these sort of things and it turns out that if you look at it on a data driven basis like a scientist, the way they do RAM today with lack of sleep, it's not, it's not the fastest way to do it. They think it is same in adventure racing today. I'd say 99% of the teams are still not sleeping enough. It's hard to sleep because you cognitively saying it's like in a triathlon, oh, if I drop my water bottle, do I pick it up? And most people won't pick it up. But the outcome is probably bad because it could, let's say 60 seconds to stop and pick up the bottle. What's the outcome if you don't might not finish the race. Bad outcome but it's hard to do. Like how many people actually stop and pick up their bottle? Like oh, I stopped, I dropped my bottle, I just keep going. Then they get dehydrated and their performance drops and the race is over.

Do you, do you think that there needs to be some sort of so thinking about sleep? So I was just thinking about things like certain ultra races where you've got to take on, you've got to collect a certain amount of water even if you decide you want to pour that away. You know, is there, is that, are there any rules at the moment or is there a responsibility somewhere that FEDERATIONS are then telling athletes that they have to take a certain number of hours over a certain number of days, for example, of sleep. Is that something you've thought about or has been thought about or is it. Does it exist in terms of rules anywhere?

Adventure racing is not regulated. There's. It's a somewhat sad story actually. In 1997 there had been a few fatalities in adventure racing and this was by the third time it was in the ESPN X Games. So I'd competed in the X Games and successfully medaled each time. But there'd been fatalities. And the third one in 97 in Mexico. There was a, during the competition, a near fatality and the girl ended up dying. She'd been a Norwegian kayak team, world level compared to competitor. We all were, we were invited teams. Everyone was a truly competitive athlete, Olympian, world champion, that kind of thing. This girl got heat stroke and then ended up dying. And by that point I'm thinking, this is not okay. We've had quite a few fatalities. Any fatality is not okay. We need to do something about it. So I had the idea with a few other people to create an international governing body to create exactly this. Safety guidelines, at least to prevent deaths, make it safer. That's what sport does, right? Safer and fairer and more accessible. So that was the idea in 97. I pursued that until I retired. So for 10 years. But then actually, frankly, the money went out of the sport and it kind of took a massive nerve side and became almost invisible for quite a long time when all the big shows disappeared in the money and the advertising and whatnot. And then there was really no reason to have governance. But then the idea came up again with Joe Decenter and the old school thing because we were both adventure races and we love the sport. So he thought, hey, let's see if we can resurrect. Well, I thought, let's see if we can resurrect it and create some structure that is truly beneficial for the community. So have the community come in and stand up for themselves and be representative. Governance, which is what sport is by and for the athletes. We can help by providing some structure and safety. I have very good safety guidelines, I thought, which still exists today, but those are not formalized. The community is divided in adventure racing. It's very, very, very small. But there's also strong commercial interests that truly want to control it. They've created these kind of crazy narratives that the sports are trying to take it over and wrestle it from the. It's all nonsense. But the idea of having safety guidelines including sleep is definitely on my agenda. But I'm one person with some ideas who loves the sport. But the sport is too divided right now for any sort of unity and we provide it. I give the community anything they want because I've got a library of useful information that is quite good for things like how do you keep the sport safe? Many, many things go into safety and the sleep one's important. Riding at night, right, on a Friday, Saturday morning, early in the morning is a good idea to ride on a road when people have been drinking on a Friday night, not a good idea. It's a basic safety guideline. Don't let people ride on the road on a Saturday morning, like early in the morning, midnight to early morning because you could get taken out by a car, distracted driver. Whether they're distracted from alcohol or texting doesn't matter. And this happened. It happens. Actually not has it happened. There are fatalities from that. So event producers doing that's a terrible idea. But they're not really thinking like that. I think like that. One of my strange and unusual expertise is legal forensic work. Advising law firms on like injury cases from kind of crazy stuff happening. And so I have acute awareness of risk and that's part of it. It's a good question, absolutely needs it. But it requires the community kind of accept the idea that it's a useful, beneficial thing to have some sort of governance that works with experience.

Yeah.

And Claire, I know you wanted to ask about the nutrition side of how, how, like that, how that differs. So I'll let you, I'll let you take the nutrition question.

Yeah, I mean I guess it's, it's, it's huge, isn't it? Because I was, I was thinking, you know, from, from an ultra running perspective, does it look like that? But then you've talked about some of the ninja events being sprint events. You know this is, this is a huge different, you know, types of nutrition that you're going to need for different things. But how, how do you feel that I guess nutrition differs from doing something like an ultra running event or an ironman sort of distance events? Because these are mult. You know, some of these events are talking about a multi day. So what did, what did you do when you were, were racing? How did that work? Did you have teams taking, you know, support crew taking the food for you? Were you carrying stuff? And that includes, you know, fluids and things as well. How did, how did that all work?

Yeah, it, like you pointed out, it depends on the distance and intensity of the competition like athletics if you're Hussein bolting 100 meters completely different nutrition program to foot training and competition to a trail runner or an ultra runner that is totally different. But Iron Man Ironman's in an interesting space. People can do Ironman so fast. I mean we see the, the pace they're doing is insane. The, the marathon times they're doing in an Ironman a competitive Ironman times. I mean look this crazy crazy intensity that requires completely different nutrition from an ultra runner for pretty much anyone. In fact I would say anyone. The top ultra runners on earth are not doing Ironman intensity competitions because the fast, a very fast iron man say eight hours. So someone doing an eight hour Ironman the intensity of that is like true fast marathon pace or road racing cycling pace or just you know 2.4 mile swim pace or forward of a K swim pace that's they are very very fast paces. But ultra runners don't do that. Ultra runners are not running a 2:40 marathon pace in an ultra they can't physiologically you can't do it. So you know you get to 50k now we're talking about kind of event racing speeds get to 50k which is the time the speed drops considerably from running a marathon to running a 50k and the distance is only 8k difference. So that now, now you start to talk about different nutrition requirements and the way we did it as so truly ultra distance with multiple sports and adventure racing for the long stuff, not the sprints before the long stuff. Pretty high fat, low carbohydrate for training and racing. And the reason is you, you cannot go off carbohydrate as a fuel source for long endurance successfully. You see it in Ironman actually see it in many triathlons and distance races. People have bought into the idea promoted by nutrition sport nutrition companies that you have to have and I saw a Number once like 70 calories per hour of carbohydrate to compete. Consider this. If you're doing you get to Kona, you're doing the Ironman in Kona and to get there you're pretty quick, right? So you've got a pretty decent pace going for everything. Swim, bike and run. When you're working, especially in the heat as you're producing energy to move, your blood is diverted to your working muscles and because it's hot to your skin to cool down. Do you think you can digest anything when you have no blood in your stomach and your gut? No. So how do you compete? How do the top athletes the better Athletes, the success athletes get through that event in probably on average 12 hours. Right. Or more so 12 hours, which is a decent time. How do you do that for 12 hours if you can't really eat anything? Well, turns out you have a lot of energy on your body. So the training effect is to compete successfully is to access stored body fat because we have a lot of it. And provided you sub threshold, if you train for it, you can get really good at it. And this is where, where I competed and I know other athletes did the same thing. I know triathletes who did this. Mark Allen, Paula Newby, Fraser. Most of the good athletes would do this. Not really telling anyone but you just, you'd see. Are they really eating that much? No. You know why? Because if you're, if you're doing your two, four, if you're like Craig Alexander or whoever doing a 240 marathon at the end of the Ironman, do you think you're really going to eat anything? Yeah. No. Why? Because you can't absorb it A little bit? Yeah, a little bit here and there. So. And that's how we did it for long endurance. It gets even more important for long endurance because you just can't eat. I mean people will try at a very low level when it's kind of walking along, hiking along. Yeah. Heart rate's low. But if you're actually racing. No, because your heart rate's too high. And by diverting blood to other places that you can't digest. You see it this, there are pools of vomit in areas in Ironmans where people. They eat, they drink, they eat, they drink, they eat, they drink. Not absorbing, throw it up, eat, they drink, they eat, they drink, they eat, they throw it up. You see it in their belly, right? You kind of got that Gatorade belly. Why not absorbing, then they throw it up and do it again and do it again. I see it in ultramarathons too with.

The, with the fat adaption conversation and I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this Claire as well.

I.

My understanding is it's more. More recent research is that that works really well for some athletes, but some athletes not so much to becoming fat adapted becomes really quite challenging for some people. Have you got any thoughts on that, Ian? I don't know how much.

I do have strong thoughts on that, so share please. So part of this is I have my master's in sports medicine and a lot was to do with nutrition and I've worked, I've got a good. I'd say he's a friend of mine and colleague Timothy Noakes. He pushed. Timothy Noakes created the first carbohydrate fuel for athletes called Leptin back in the 70s, I think. And he pushed the idea of carbohydrate loading and fuel for athletes for decades. But then at a conference was told by, I think some Swedish and Norwegian scientists that he was wrong and being a good scientist, he wrote a book about it. Challenging beliefs or something like that. He scrapped his head and. Well, I don't believe it. But you know what? I'm a scientist and I'm going to see what's going on here. The science is very, very old, by the way. This is not new at all. Science has been around for best part of a century and fully supported. There's another book about this too. It's called the Big Fat Surprise. Big Fat Surprise. It's all about. If you haven't read it, absolutely. It's a fantastic read. Heavily science based. Many, many, many good references of which there are a huge weight of evidence about this. Let's go back to what a Homo sapien does in a natural environment and how humans have evolved over, let's say 3 million years. But actual Homo sapiens for 100,000 in a natural environment in England. What carbohydrate can you eat without industrialized food or agriculture most of the time? What can you actually eat?

Like cereals, like. Or potatoes.

Agriculture arrived from South America.

We're talking about natural things like berries and that growing on in the hedgerow.

Exactly. So for most of humans existence 100,000 years or so and 3 million before that is Homo sapiens of some description. The what would you actually eat in England? What can you find scavenging around?

It depends what time of year, but this time of year. Well, actually towards the end of the year you get blackberries and things like that that are in the hedgerow that you could pick and eat.

And how long would they last for?

Not very long.

So the rest of the year. Yeah, let's say you have a month to pick berries. What do you do for the other 11 months?

Survive on protein and fat from, from animals.

Exactly. So how humans evolved. This is human biology. This is, this is mammalian biology. This is, this is our gut. To look at the length of a human's, a human's digestive tract and what they can actually. And what actually works, fat and protein. Very, very similar to a, to a. Not, not an ungulate, not, not a vegan animal, like a, like an ungulate, meaning something with hoofs so something like a cow or a goat or a horse or something. If we were. If. Let's take the vegan argument. It does go back to competition, by the way. But the vegan argument is you will be healthier as a vegan. And I'd say for most humans, that is true for a while because they're cutting crap out of their diets and eating good stuff. But can you survive as a vegan? Turns out you cannot because you can't cut complete proteins out of your diet and survive. You can't cut fat out of your diet and survive. You know what? You can cut out of your diet and survive or maybe even get healthier. PHELPS Carbohydrate, it has zero nutrition. Carbohydrate, when our water comes in, often has nutrition, which is good, like berries. But the carbohydrate itself, which is actually glucose in your bloodstream, has zero nutritional value and is tolerated very well by humans because we lay it down as stored fat to survive for the other 11 months and we don't get it in the natural environment. We tolerate it, but it's actually toxic. If you look at the role of, of carbohydrate in the human diet, it has a use for survival, to put on fat to survive. But, and it's tolerable. But most of the, most of the common things you find killing people, actually killing people. Atherosclerosis, diabetes, this kind of stuff. Where does that come from? And how do you stop a diet? Someone with diabetes having diabetes, don't eat carbohydrate. It's pretty simple anyway. It's a whole nother. It's kind of weird. We've taken.

But it's a massive area, is it not?

It is a massive debate and.

Yeah, the debate on carbohydrate versus, versus fat. How. I mean, I think the important thing to think about sort of the listeners as well, is that you. Because we have carbohydrates and fats and proteins in our diet that you've got to be able to train to adapt yourself to be able to take on fats, fats as a fuel and you use your, your, your fats as a fuel as well.

Yeah.

So. So did you, I guess, you know, did you train yourself to do that? Did you, did it take very long for you to be able to adapt, to use fats as a fuel?

No, it's actually very quick. The reason is it is the default energy pathway. We're talking about energy pathways now. Is it the oxidative energy pathway or not, you know, oxidative, meaning the Krebs cycle, which, in which the Krebs cycle, by the way, people say, oh, it's got glucose in it, you must need to eat it. No, it's not true. You create the glucose from fat. This is the cat, the fat pathway. It's not the oxidative part. And you want, you want the right energy pathway. You don't. And it is the default one. That's what most like humans in a natural environment do for 11 months of the year is basically stored fat, right? So people get it wrong. You eat fat to burn fat. No, you burn it off your body. You. It's very uncomfortable to compete consuming fat in a dietary sense. It's not eating fat and burning it, it's burning it off your body. This is where people get it wrong. It's like, oh, I'm going to eat some butter and use that for my fuel in my race. Bad idea. I mean, butter is delicious, but using it as a fuel while racing at any sort of intensity is terrible idea because you probably can't digest it. What they don't understand is that you're burning your stored fat and you get really, really good at it. It's, it's mobilization of free fatty acids. So mobilizing stored fat is really what it is. There's lots of ways to do it. You do it all night, everyone does it all night, whether they know it or not. They're doing it all night because they're fasting at night. And you can push that fasting more and more and more until it's habitual. And I would do this to this day. I've probably been doing for 30 years. When I was competing. I, you know, I'd train for eight hours a day and I would get up in the morning and I would train. I'd drink some water and I would train. So I'd be fasted already. I would have already fasted for eight hours. Then I'd go and train for another four to eight hours. So now I'm 12 to 16 hours in without eating. Super comfortable. In fact, to this day I do not like eating in the morning. Don't like it, it's uncomfortable. I'll have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or something, but that's it. And then by mid afternoon I'll start to get a little peckish and start to eat something. And that's, that's. And I've stayed lean. I'm the same way I was when I was in university. A Very similar body composition to when I was in university. And that's, that's dietary. People go, I've heard this one from some of the nutrition companies, eat what you want. Or you know, they say, eat what you want. Just work, work out and work it off your body. Well, good luck. Again, the numbers are completely wrong because it's super easy to eat 4, 000 calories in food a day. Super easy. How long do you have to run to burn that off?

A long time. Yeah.

About nine calories per mile. So 4,000. No, sorry, 100. About 100. So 40 miles. You've got to run 40 miles to burn that off. You can eat it easily. But how many people are going to go run 40 miles to burn it off? Again, that's nonsense. Not going to do that. Crazy talk. I mean for an Ironman training, sure, of course you're doing that most days. But how many people actually do that? And is it good for you? No. Terrible idea.

Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? Because I think I definitely eat more since training for Ironmans and you know, and throughout that time I've been losing weight because of the training. But equally when I hear the level of training that you're doing and how long you're fasting throughout the day, I think that's, that's. Yeah, that would feel very challenging to me at the moment.

It's a, it's habit too. So the default energy pathway is not through the carbohydrate cycle. It's not. Which makes it uncomfortable to make any switch. Once you habituate to carbohydrate intake and burning carbohydrate, you kind of get. It's like, it's. I think the most common thing people would know about would be the marathon bonk at 20, 20 miles. They go, oh, I only get 20 or 18 or 20 miles. And then. And they have this severe bonk. That's because they ran out of stored glycogen. Yeah. And they're not accessing fat. But for someone like me, I eat nothing, I go out and I just run the whole thing and I feel completely comfortable. I can do that for a marathon distance, anything or cycling or whatever. I can do that quite comfortably and not eat because I'm habituated to storing my stored fat as fuel, which is our default. And that's why when you get to do it, go through the uncomfortable phase of readapting to the energy pathway, not only is it easy, it's not just easy, it's like only thing you want to do nutrition varies wildly because if you're the sprint athlete, let's say you're doing a one minute effort or a ten second effort. Fueling and nutrition and training are completely different from the long endurance stuff. Let's say sprint triathlon, different fueling mechanism. Because they're so short, you are over anaerobic threshold. If you're competitive, it's like a 5k effort. Right. That kind of effort or 10k from 100 meters, which is fully anaerobic, to 200, 400, 800, 1500, 3k, 5k. The energy mechanisms change. So having those kind of efforts spin triathlon is a good example because your efforts are very short. Doing a, doing a 5k run is absolutely not a marathon. If you're a really good athlete, you're probably at least 15% anaerobic. If you're that, if you're really good now you've got a completely. Now you are just glycogen and for the first minute or so your blood sugar, that changes everything. The transition error changes it too. Having that minute or whatever it is in your transition. Yeah. You can and should probably eat something as close to glucose as possible because right into your bloodstream and that changes everything. Yeah, like if I, if anyone was doing that, for sure you're going to have a different fueling program and you're going to have different training. I mean it's just a different same. With your Ironman training, you're not running marathons. You might be doing bricks, which are quite long, but your shorter sessions, like pool sessions are different. Again, you burn all your glycogen in your pool session and then you eat a ton of it because you want to replenish it so you can do it again. And if you don't, you're not going to do that overnight. Eating, eating fat and protein that day. You have to eat carbohydrate and a lot of it. Brilliant. That's where people get mistakes. Think, oh, Ian, he's that fat guy. Yeah, for some things. Yeah. You know what? You're gonna do something shorter and more intense. You better have the cars because otherwise you will, you will crash and you won't be able to train.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's brilliant. That's really, really good advice. Thank you. So one of the things that we do on this podcast is get the previous guest to ask the next guest a question without knowing who that is going to be. So our previous guests were Will and Raya Usher, who run precision coaching and their question or Raya's Question was, what tech has had the greatest impact for you in your sport?

Tech.

What tech as in technology?

Technology. Let's define what my sport is. Okay, so until 2007 it was adventure racing and since then it went back to triathlon. Actually started as a triathlete around the same time as adventure racing.

So you can pick technology from either.

In that case, from almost anything these days. Well, for the past 10 years it's been obstacle stuff and now mostly ninja stuff. In ninja. No tech speak of, I would say smartwatch. The reason is I can loosely follow time. Quite useful time, heart rate, distance, elevations. Things that are kind of useful for me as a, I'm going to say an enthusiastic recreational athlete these days. It's, it's just kind of nice to go out and kind of know what I've been doing and that's just kind of confirmational. But I like it. It's, it's. That has the biggest effect on me today because it's a motivator too. It's like, oh, have I done that today? And if my, if my, my watch is. Oh no, then I head out the door and helps me get out the door, which I want to do, but I get buried at my desk.

But it doesn't sound like you're massively emotional driven by the technology. So Will's follow up question to that is what other piece of equipment or service would have the biggest impact on performance?

On performance. In the. I'm going to talk about what I do today. The piece of equipment that would be most useful for me is a pull up bar. Oh, okay. Yes. On a pull up bar you can do many things, not just pull ups. A pull up bar you can hang. This is the ninja stuff. So in an obstacle sense there's a lot of what we call hanging obstacles, ones where you swing off on a bar you can do many, many, many things. You can do dead hangs, you can do static hangs, you can do swinging hangs, you can do pull ups. You can do all sorts of different moves, like calisthenic moves and other things that help with your grip and your, and your movements through any obstacle. So a very simple pull up bar. There's a good one out of UK called pull up Mate, by the way. It's just a freestanding thing. Fantastic. Yeah, you can just put it in your back garden or something or in your house maybe. So a pull up. Very simple. Brilliant.

Thank you.

And two simple things which is really good.

One of the other questions that we love to ask on this podcast is book recommendations. Now you've already given us a couple actually Tim Noakes is one and the big fat surprise. But are there any other books that you find yourself recommending in any kind of, you know, in any area of life that you found really helpful for you?

Sure. There's a book called why we Sleep.

Oh, that's a brilliant book.

Yeah. You guys know it?

Yes, that is a very, very good book. But what did you take from that?

Why is.

Why. Why do you pick that book?

It's important for health and longevity and not killing people. Yeah, the Dr. Matthew Walker is a smart guy. There was no. There was very little science and data around actual sleep. Why and how now that that's become is a real thing. Now one of the things the take homes from his book was the data around daylight savings. Yeah, the. If you guys will know remember this the. The biggest data that's. And it's compelling because it's big data. This is real numbers now with true statistics and actual probability that 1 hour time change causes a staggering number of deaths in all countries that have it every year. When the clock changes so that you get one hour less sleep, all cause mortality goes through the roof. All cause mortality means people dying from anything and everything. Heart attack, car crashes, falling off a roof. All cause mortality goes. It's a staggering change from one hour change because it takes a few weeks to readjust for that one hour. It's like jet lag but for hundreds of millions of people. Now you can track the data that was compelling. For me, I'm curious, I'm skeptical. So as a science kind of guy, I'm like I'm always curious, but also skeptical. It's like the fat thing. I was very skeptical about it, but curious. Just like Timothy Knobs then read the books, saw the data, checked the studies, checked the study studies, checked the method. I checked all the stuff went yeah, they're kind of right. Just kind of like really right. By the way. So big pet surprise why we sleep. Water. Here's another one. Waterlogged. That's a good one. Timothy Noakes. Waterlogged. I was just going through this with my wife who's got a podcast. She's going on about hydration. Hydration, absolutely necessary. Keeps us fit, healthy, happy, not dead. How many deaths from dehydration are there in the scientific literature from athletic events?

Not as many as hyponatremia.

Ah, good answer. Any guesses to how many actual subtract? Zero.

Oh, there we go.

How many from hyponatremia in the United States? Here's a good one. In the United States, how many people die from hyponatremia each year? Well, hang on, let's look at another way. How many people are hospitalized? How many people have it? How many people hospitalized? And how many people die from hyponatremia?

No idea.

It's a hard one to guess. So it was sort of rhetorical. 50,000 people are hospitalized in the United States from Hyponatremia every year. 6% die. Wow. 3,000 deaths a year, hyponia.

And yet nobody dies from.

From no one's dehydration. Not one. Incidence in the scientific literature of people dying from dehydration during an athletic competition. It's never happened. Wow.

Yeah, I have, I have heard about that book before but never read it. And like. So I'm going to make it, add it to my reading list because that.

Challenging beliefs.

Yeah.

Another one. Timothy Noakes. Yes. Challenging beliefs. This one's more about the fat and carbohydrate. It was the first book about it. Fat and carbohydrate, Challenging beliefs. Yeah. There's. You can dive into his stuff. It's fantastic. So I can keep interrupting you endlessly with ideas that pop into my head about books another time.

I. I love an ever expanding reading list, but we could probably talk about books for the, for another.

A good.

Another hour as well. But Ian, it's been absolutely fascinating getting you on the podcast. I. I've really enjoyed hearing about a side of the endurance world and sport that is completely different to anything that I've done before, but really does sound very exciting. So I'm definitely going to do some more exploring on this, particularly the adventure racing. I think it sounds fantastic. I just want to finish off with one question that's just kind of struck me as. So with, with triathlon, we kind of understand the health benefits for doing it and whether you take it, when you, when you take it to the extreme, whether there is, you know, whether those continue is a good question. But where do you see the health benefits? Somebody that's getting into a sport purely to be the healthiest they can be. Are there any, is there any sign. I'm guessing that from the conversation there's science around whether the obstacle racing is better for you than just sort of straightforward endurance. So what's the science around that?

I don't think there is science around obstacle racing and I don't think there's science around adventure racing for health benefits. Anecdotally. No, I'm not going to say anecdotally. Anyone doing any sport, if they're moving more, there is science around that and standing. Actually, there's a lot more science around that. Standing versus sitting. The. If you just get off your, your ass, get out of your chair, whether it's standing at your desk and it looks like you're standing. Yep, yep, exactly. Yeah, So I, I ditched my chair. It was another Timothy Noakes thing. It arrived out of work. I was working with him in South Africa, Cape Town, at the University of Sport, his sports science institute in South Africa. And we were talking about sitting and standing. And increasingly at these medical conferences and other things, you see people not sitting. The scientists start, Understand this was 15 years ago, maybe longer, people would be standing around the sides of the seating. They weren't sitting in the chairs. And I was scratching my head and started asking a few people and they said, oh, yeah, the data's in. Because the science knows before. It's like climate change. The scientists knew decades ago what was going on, but they're really conservative, but they just start doing what they know they believe to be true. This is a whole nother discussion, like what you believe to be true, but what is actually true. And scientists have this kind of unfortunate habit of being scientific about everything. We're not going to say that. We know they don't in their heart, and they believe. It's the same with the sitting and standing thing. Fifteen years ago, the scientists and the medical people knew, in their core, they knew it was true. Sitting is catastrophically bad for humans. One, it's one minute. It'll take one minute off your life for every hour you sit. For most humans in our world, in the industrialized world, it's 10 years off your life by sitting. Wow. You sit for breakfast, you sit in your car, you sit in the office, you sit in your car again, you sit at your dining table, you sit on the couch, you sit, you sit, you sit, you sit, you sit. Homo sapiens, going back to the evolutionary thing. Don't do that. Don't even. In agricultural societies, no sitting. Very rare evolutionary. Humans don't sit. They move or they rest or they chase something. Right. So not doing that. Being an athlete is a big part of the solution. Stand up at your desk and if you have on and move a lot, and moving is not racing or. But training at long endurance is actually perfect because if you're not doing high intensity, which you shouldn't be because you should be doing long, slow endurance stuff, that's super healthy, and you're moving all the time, right? That's great. So whether it's an obstacle race or Ironman or at jogging around the block, if you're moving, that's good. That's all you need to know. Which goes back to one very big thing, which I'll leave everyone with. The purpose of sport. Why? Why? Well, simple answer. Make better humans. That's what sport does. Making better humans through sport. That's our actual model motto, World obstacle. But it's true. It's like the Olympic movement. Making better people. That's it. That's what, that's the purpose. And that's lots and lots of things. Mental, physical, emotional, cultural, societal. You develop communities, which is like blue zone living. Right? Communities. That's what sport is. You have a community of athletes you do stuff with and it's fantastic because they're your friends and that helps you live longer and happier, that sport. Brilliant.

Well, on that note, I think that's a fantastic way to round up. Like you say, you become the average of the people you hang out with. So essentially, the more you can create that community around. Around the sport, the better. The better you will be and the better the world will be. So fantastic. Ian, it's been an absolute pleasure getting to understand a little bit more about the world of obstacle racing, ninja racing, and the adventure racing. But also we've ended up going down some different avenues that I didn't expect to explore in quite as much depth, which has been really fascinating. So thank you very much and yeah, but I've got no doubt that everyone has taken a huge amount from this.

Well, I hope everyone's skeptical about it. And Charlie, Claire, thank you very much. It's been my pleasure. Happy to jump on again anytime. Talk about anything you want. Food, not food. Gardening, sailing.

Very happy. Good conversation around coffee is always good.

Coffee sounds good. Jump into my second cup it.

If you want to find out more about Ian, the best place to head is to ianadamson.com or on Facebook. He's Ian A. Adamson. And Instagram also Ian A. Adamson. If you like what we do at the Tribathlon podcast, you've got to register for Tribe Talk. It's an email that comes out every two weeks, packed full of everything to do with swim, bike and run, but also nutritional help, business coaching, and a whole lot more. Whether that's books, videos, TED talks, apps or technologies, it's packed full of ideas that can help improve your sport, your life and your business. So register for it@tribathlon.com and you'll be sure. To that every two weeks, your inbox is full of some amazing ideas and resources to improve your life. So what did you make of that interview with Ian?

Awesome. I mean, I didn't. I kind of knew a little bit about events racing, didn't really know much about what the difference was between OCR and all the different levels of obstacle racing that there is. So you, you know, when we were talking. Absolutely. Right. I was thinking, right, how could I do this? What. What race am I going to do? But I think as his stories got deeper in terms of. One of them was. Was to. And the Antarctic. Was it through.

Wasn't it through the Arctic Circle?

I think the Arctic Circle. I was just thinking. I. And then I was just thinking, actually, you need a really experienced team to start doing those things. But yeah, again, some amazing stories and yeah, from being an athlete, winning things, being a triathlete and then going into doing these obstacle races. Yeah, amazing. What did you think? I'm sure your mind was also thinking the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So I love the idea of this. This sounds like brilliant fun, that Godzone race. Straight onto my bucket list. I just think, like. And when he described that his last race, which was the one through Scandinavia, that went through the Arctic Circle, I think, yeah. Where you've got like the northern lights and the kind of like, he's just like, oh, the orcas. I mean, he had me at the northern lights and then he mentioned the orcas and I was like, that's it. That just sounds absolutely incredible.

So.

Yeah, well, I mean, what a brilliant conversation to understand about a whole different world. Right. So, I mean, I expected us to be talking about. More about. Yeah, basically like tough mudders and ninja stuff. And that I can see is kind of like great fun. But those adventure races sound like an incredible thing.

Yeah. It almost seemed like kind of like the gym version or a smaller version that lots of people could join into, you know, in terms of things like the. The ninja, for example. Two things that actually, I don't even know where I'd start to get a team together or what do I need to learn to actually get there and what equipment do I need, you know, so it was both, like, from each end of the scale, wasn't it?

It was.

And I did try and get my team together out of my posse and as soon as I mentioned kayaking, I think they all just sort of ran away in the opposite direction.

But.

But, like, to end up.

I would do it. I would absolutely do it. Whatever we need to learn. That's that's. Yeah.

Excellent, excellent. So that's. That's two people. So I did look at a God zone afterwards and the Godzone, it needs to be a team of four to be. To qualify, to be in with a chance of actually winning something which, not that we're going to have any chance of that, but you have to have at least one female within that. But in 2024, it finishes in the Marlborough region. So it starts and finishes in the Marlborough region, which is obviously like New Zealand's most famous wine.

I was about to say it's nothing to do with wine. I was going to mention that when you said you quite like to do it.

Absolutely, Definitely. I've been to the Marlborough region and the wine there is absolutely incredible. And the idea of finishing and celebrating in the Marlborough region is just. Yeah, awesome. I suspect I might need a little bit more time than between now and.

2024 to get organized and learn a few new sports.

Yes, yes, yes.

Like counter Kai. But it did it. It struck me that there was a lot of similarities between that and ultra running. But without being quite so hot, like ultra running is clearly really difficult if you have. If you can't run more than 30, 40 miles, you know, if your knees are not willing. Whereas this strikes me as something that takes longer. But you still get those same awesome experiences of being out for the days on end, experiencing kind of the sort of rugged parts of the world. I did think that that would be. Yeah, it's just an alternative to that, isn't it?

Yeah. And I think we're seeing this diversification, aren't we, away from sort of mainstream competitions like triathlon into. I mean, ultra running. Running kind of exploded, didn't it, over lockdown. But, but yeah, these, these ultra events that the. As humans we're kind of searching more and more to be able to experience different things. And you know, I was even thinking back to. I forget the name of it actually, but it, it's ultra running, essentially. And then you are hang gliding off a hill and then you're running again. So.

Yes, I can't remember what it's called either.

No, I can't remember.

But bloody crazy is what it should be.

But really, really good fun. And I can see, you know, there's an element of how do you win? Well, you've got to run and then you've got to find the highest hill to get the most distance when you're flying to then be able to run again. So I think, yeah, we're seeing all these kind of Permutations, aren't we? Of, of, of different things and I think almost like we're moving, moving athletes around again, you know, that maybe we're losing them from traditional mainstream sport into kind of other areas.

It is, I think, I think it's the long tail, isn't it? Essentially, instead of it being mass organized events, people are trying to do more and more niche, different sort of interesting quirky variations on it. And it's kind of a bit what we talked about with Bob Babbitt, wasn't it? And the blue ocean stuff of just doing, you know, weird combinations. You know, whether it's speed golf or whether it's bringing a horse into it or whether it's a hand glider or a kayak, it's all just essentially it's endurance and adventure, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

The other thing I thought was, Sorry. The other thing I thought was really interesting that he said about was the importance of sleeping and the amount of sleep.

Yeah, yeah.

So that impact of getting his, his team to sleep longer than they realized and they lost all of their advantage but then won by a whole day because of it. I thought that was really interesting.

I, I, I truly think that people forget how much sleep we actually need. And you know, even on a day to day basis in terms of learning about yourself as well and how much you need and how much of a competitive advantage even in day to day life it's going to give you. Whereas we're constantly, aren't we in such busy lifestyles cutting down on our sleep. So it's no wonder when you get to a competition, you think, oh, I can, I can do without, you know, I've got to kind of keep, keep moving. So that, yeah, that was, that was really interesting to hear about. And actually the, well, we know the studies of long term effects of not sleeping enough or getting a good quality sleep and sleeping at the wrong times of day. And he kind of led on a little bit, he touched a little bit on the science of that, didn't he? In terms of long term health. He, you know, he was talking about his own long term health and the effects of doing this endurance sport for such a, you know, many years of his life.

Yeah, you're right. And it's so actually I've been listening to a few different things from Matthew Walker, the guy who wrote why We Sleep and he talks about the kind of short, medium and long term effects. So the short term effects are that for example, a nurse that has just finished a 24 hour shift is 168% more likely to have a crash on the way home than normally. So you can, it can affect you short term by just being overly tired and having a crash. It can affect you medium term in the, it, it causes, you know, it can massively increase your risk of things like diabetes, diabetes, cancers, all that sort of heart disease, all of that kind of stuff, plus stress and anxiety. Really big impact on that. And then long term it's things like Alzheimer's, you know, it's, it's, it's.

And that's, that's the overall body stress or stressor effect that we get, isn't it? That combination? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think sleep is, is fascinating and hopefully we'll have somebody else on, on the, on the podcast to do sleep as well.

We need to, we do need to line up that. We need to find somebody for season five. I think we've obviously had Dr. Charlotte.

I have a couple in my, in my, yeah, in my, on my list to contact. So let's see if we can get someone on.

Do that. Do that.

Brilliant. Right?

Well that's another episode, a brilliant episode. Really different episode and I really enjoyed it and I hope people got lots of interesting takeaways from it and another episode done. So good luck with your training and yours. Thank you very much. And for everyone else, keep on training. And remember, this episode was brought to you by the Trusted team and by fourth Discipline. So if you want to find out more about how the Trusted team can help you grow your business and improve your work life balance, go to thetrusted team. And if you want to find out more about how fourth Discipline can help take your performance in sport and life to the next level, go to fourthdiscipline.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please do review it and share it because it helps other people find what we think is really valuable learning lessons from amazing athletes. So please do that. You can also find the whole back catalog@tribathlon.com and you can also find out about the tribeathlon app, which helps people find events, find people to train with and enjoy their events through their tribe. So check out tribathlon.com.