Training for Adventure Retreats Heat, Altitude, Oh My

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. If you have ever, or you are right now thinking about joining Flipping 50 and I for a retreat, for what I'm going to call an adventure retreat, because anything that you've not done for the first time is an adventure, it's new, and it may simply be that You're an alone person. You go for hikes by yourself, you exercise by yourself, or you do it at home with a video. And yet it's still very different to come together with a community of women that you may or may not know. So many of our retreat attendees have been first-timers at one point or other, and most, although I can say we've had a couple who've come with a friend, like met a college roommate who lived in another state, who've met a sister, you know, or a college roommate. I've, I've included a couple of college roommates in retreats previously, so there was a lot of fun to be had by having the feeling of living on sorority row. In fact, we had that very thing at the last retreat when we were all in Airbnbs within 3 to 5 minutes from each other, outside of a couple others staying at hotels a little bit a little bit further away because they had spouses with them. You know, it was just a ton of fun. And, you know, in about 3 days, in the right environment, you get to know people. And sometimes you get to know people that you end up being more comfortable with in 3 to 4 days than, than you can with your next-door neighbor who you've lived next to for 40 years. So it's such a great environment. But if you've ever thought about it, if you've ever wondered what would it be like to do this, what would it be like to train for it. Stay tuned because this episode is all about it. Now you know there's going to be an invitation to join us at the end. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond. Before you knew to ask them. Yeah. The goal to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made-for-menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. All right, so first of all, any of you are watching this and you're seeing a video or a video clip, this is not a beauty pageant and I am not a beauty queen. And so this is raw and in the real, and this is so literal. I mean, I'm really pointing out the fact that my hair is a mess because I've just come out of the pool. And I'll tell you why this is so very relevant. I have a swimsuit underneath a sundress and it's— they do not match. They are not color coordinated. So again, I emphasize, this is not a beauty pageant. I am not a beauty queen. So we're all okay. We're all good. Here's why I'm, I'm in the moment that I'm in, and I'm reviewing some of the things I'm reviewing. Those of you who follow me on YouTube may realize I've done some real shorts there and on Instagram on, hey, here's how I snack. You know, this for short walks, this for long endurance, this for in between. And I have prompts today, so I also am going to show them in case you're watching any video part of this. You may see some of this later, but I wanna share with you that what I've done today is done a little stretching. I've gone for a 30-minute swim. From the swim in a fairly cool pool, it was reasonable. Usually here in Phoenix, they heat it and it feels like swimming in a bathtub, and you actually are heating up, and the air feels cooler than the pool, which is wrong because it's 105 degrees. But I also got out of the cool pool into the hot tub, which I rarely do, and then back into the cool pool. So a little flush of warm, hot, warm, hot, and— or, or cool to hot to cool. And the reason is that increases circulation. So it's the cool that actually brings down inflammation And the warm kind of helps fluidity of the muscles, releases tension, but you actually want to come back into the cool to release and reduce the inflammation. It's okay to bring a surge of circulation in, but we don't necessarily want to keep it there. So last night, first night back from an adventure retreat from the Grand Canyon rim to river to rim, and I'll talk more about that, I did about 25 minutes of sauna. Now, on a normal day, if I were going to sauna, I would probably go for about 40 minutes, but all in, you know, it's already baked, the preheated the oven, and now it's in. I'm going to stick myself in and bake it for about 40 minutes. But, you know, the day before we had done this, and so for me it was about an 8-hour hike, 16.5 miles. The last night of that By the way, it's all up and it's tough. It's challenging. It, it was hot at the end. Not as bad actually as last year. It was probably about 10 degrees cooler and still it's taxing on your body. So I didn't need to add extra stress still in that first recovery day. So I did a very short walk in the morning, a little bit of a stretch with some of our ladies, and we're talking 10 minutes of a walk and maybe 10, 20 minutes of a stretch pre and post. And then also midday, halfway home, stopped, got out, walked in Sedona for 30 minutes, but we're talking easy, easy hike. And then on the way home, you know, just lots of sitting and then did a sauna when I got home. And the reason was, again, keeping the stress low but moving. And sauna is great for recovery, by the way. And I will put the one I use. I have a Sunlighten sauna, purchased it long before I knew I needed to use it to help detox from mold while I was being exposed to it. Fortunately, I had it. I got it for recovery. I got it for facilitating recovery, for pampering, for just natural detox of sweating. But it's also great for skin. It's great for so many things, and, and including speeding up the autophagy that everybody talks about getting or wanting from fasting and from high-intensity interval training. So you can get some of the results from exercise by not exercising, by getting into your sauna, but you can't stretch that too far. By the way, you do need to exercise. So now that we've established why we're here, let me tell you about what we have just done. So this weekend, we arrived in the Grand Canyon on Thursday had a pre-prep dinner in anticipation of the rim to river to rim hike on Friday. So 5 o'clock dinner, we were a table of 8, and 7 women had come in, flown in, drove in, yeah, and drove down. So depending on where they came from, North Carolina was in the house, Detroit, Michigan, Colorado Springs and Phoenix, all in the house. So we, you know, did an early dinner, talked about, you know, the start, talked about fueling. They'd been coached since they began, one-on-one sessions talking about how to begin the very early, just basic training, what we needed in terms of strength training, agility training, how to begin fueling, whether they wanted to use poles or not. If they did, they should them early, start using them regularly. CamelBaks or hydration packs of another brand. How they wanted weighted vests to use on certain hikes, not necessarily the longest of them when they were going to use hydration packs, but on some of those early shorter ones and while they were strength training, that those would be good. So we talked about all the things that we'll elaborate on here for adding stressors so that no matter where they were coming from— so Michigan to Phoenix, imagine this, Colorado Springs to Phoenix, North Carolina to Phoenix, or to the Grand Canyon, and then Phoenix to the Grand Canyon— probably the easiest for our Phoenix peeps, including myself, to adapt if they'd done the training. But the challenge, one of the challenges in Phoenix doing the training, was to overcome the heat. And so of all the people there, I was probably the least trained. I was the most undertrained. Now, if you want to come in undertrained versus overtrained, which is better? Under. It's because you don't want to be overly tired, fatigued, pushed, stretched to the limit, depleted immune system, adrenal stressed already. You want to be fresh, and then you may have an overreach and you may suffer from that a little bit more, but it's much better to be undertrained for any race for anything, not way undertrained, however, and you have to have had the right stressors. So one of the two very important things I want you to think about— how would you answer this question if I said, what's most important in a hike like this? And I'll describe it to you in fairness— putting in the miles and/or doing the strength and the power and the agility training. Which would you think right out of the gate in quick response? So obviously this is a one-way conversation. You're not being quizzed. And if you're on a hike right now, nobody will know if you chose the right answer or not. But let me tell you about the hike. So when you go to the Grand Canyon, it's reverse of most hikes. So most hikes, if you were going to say hike a mountain or you're hiking in the woods, most of the time you would begin going up. An end coming down if there's a hill involved. Well, in the Grand Canyon, it is a canyon after all, so you start on one rim, you go down, and then you come back up. So in the rim to rim that we did this all from the, all from the south side, so from one south trail to down to the river, coming up a different south trail. So we had a little variety. We didn't just do it down one trail back up the same trail. But yet this is a rim to river to rim. It's not North Rim to the river to South Rim, which is much longer. That's a 23-mile hike. So what we did is 16.5. It's doable in a day depending on are you ready for it? Are you prepared? And have you stressed your body in the way that's appropriate so that you adapt and got the resilience that you needed. So looking for the kind of stressor that would adapt you. So trusting the process, really important. And, you know, we did this when in June we had the Colorado retreat in Boulder. So Mile High, right? Denver. So, you know where you're going and you know the air is gonna be thinner there. So whatever work you've done elsewhere, coming to do that same work at altitude will be a stretch, right? That's going to be harder because you don't have the same oxygen supply, and we're not wearing masks. You can buy them, but we hope we don't need to get to that point. But it is going to feel like work. Now, there's a little secret that I let people in on, and that is that, you know, if you land and you actually do the hardest hikes in the first day or two you have this little, you know, mechanism. That's a better window of time than to wait for, say, 3 days, unless you can wait for 2 weeks to really adapt to the situation where you're going to be much better off. So we still— how do we train somebody who's, you know, in Ohio or Illinois to come to altitude and be prepared to do it? So they may not have the hills that are the same as the mountains, but we can create and mimic steps and height and climbing. And you don't necessarily need to do bleacher climbing, although that might be something that mentally helps you to prepare. But the way to get strong enough to handle a lot of up and incline is by heavy strength training, heavy squats, heavy lunges, heavy step-ups. Wearing that weighted vest, using a StairMaster while you're wearing a weighted vest, using an incline treadmill wearing the weighted vest. So you can find ways to mimic what you're about to do. Now, we can't give you less oxygen, but you could use a sauna, you could use cold plunges. Sauna probably would be better going for the heat just because, again, hormetic stressor Is it altitude? No. Is there less oxygen? Not necessarily, but it is a hormetic stressor. And if we can get you used to— we're going to give you stress so that you're more resilient. Even though we can't necessarily do that oxygen exchange, we can prepare you for handling stress. You're going to do far better. And if we have you very hydrated, well hydrated before you arrive, and keep you well hydrated on those hikes and after so that consecutive hikes or other activities are comfortable and you're hydrated for each and every one of those, you're going to be just fine. So I've hinted a little bit at what was the preparation like. So initially when you, when you see what I did there, when you sign up, when you register for your retreat, whether you might join us in 2025, for instance, in early in the year in Phoenix. If you are dying to get out of the cold and the snow, wherever it may be where you are, and you want to come and truly get away, we are going to do something I've never done. It makes me sweat just a little bit, and that is unplug. So literally, the campsite where we would go, part of the challenge and the adventure would be you won't have much cell phone use. You will not be working on your laptop or your iPad in between sessions or in the morning, you won't have the option. So that will be hard, very hard for me, probably most of all. But how refreshing will that be not to have it matter really what time it is except for listening for the dinner bell? But that will be a retreat all on site, so it'll be inclusive. We will have access to a lot of fun activities. I hate to spoil it by telling you all of them, but there may or may not be horseback riding, there may or may not be some water activity. There will of course be means of doing yoga and/or core workshops and some other things. So there you have it. Or you could join us in the end of May, beginning of June. So literally it says, I believe, May 28th through June 1st, and that is in Boulder, Colorado. So We use the entire Boulder, Colorado area, so we have some excursions that go outside. So you do need transportation. You'll want to have a car or have driven in or have a rental car that you have access to. You will be in charge of your own shared Airbnb or a hotel, and we give you the proximity so you know. But again, last time We did this so that we were all right there in Sorority Row within 2 to 3 minutes of walking for a lot of those staying in the neighborhood, and within 5 to 10 minutes of driving to each other, so that we were all there. We were all commuting to the hiking venues together, carpooling, things like that. So when you register, what happens is Sometimes if you register early enough, you get a one-on-one call with me. And during that one-on-one call, what we're doing is talking about getting you ready, getting you ready for the retreat, what needs to happen, what your base training looks like. About 90 days out from most retreats, I start preparing you for the training, the actual distances in a week's worth of training. There's some critical pieces that need to be there. So for instance, long hikes accumulate over time, and by this point, at some point in your life, you may have done a 5K or a 10K or half or a full marathon for that matter, and you understand how that goes. There's a method to the madness. You do about half the distance during a midweek hike as you will for your long distance. So if the long hike on the weekend is 6 miles, you do 3 on Wednesday, or you have a little wiggle room to move that. But giving yourself this buildup over time, so total weekly mileage goes up incrementally on purpose with a plan. There are also recovery weeks, not just recovery days, but recovery weeks as well as days within each week. And then there's strength training. So strength, power, and agility are crucial pieces when we're talking hiking, we're talking hiking up— yes, and down, that's important too— but hiking up, when you are going steeply up and you live on a flat, we need to train. And that training occurs with not just a StairMaster or an, an, a treadmill on incline, but it occurs with the power that happens in deep hip and knee flexion and extension against resistance. That is a lunge, my friends, or it's a squat. It might be a deadlift. I'm not a huge fan, you might be surprised to hear that, but over 40 years I've seen more injuries occur because of deadlifts done incorrectly by people who were not prepared and/or not taught good form and can't recognize it when they're doing it, that this is or isn't good form. So is it a good butt exercise? Can be, but can be hard on the insertion or origin point of your hamstrings, and women tend to have problems with that already. So we have to watch out for those things. But that said, looking at what that training is early on, really important in terms of we get you prepared by working through the week by week, building the total accumulated mileage so you're ready for whatever the long hike will be. So with Grand Canyon, for instance, it was 16.5. We didn't get to decide, right? We had decided we were doing South Rim to South Rim and doing what is called South Kaibab down through the river across the bridge. We actually— you actually go across the bridge twice. So you're on south, you're staying on south, but you're coming over and then back over again in order to come back up a different trail. So what we're doing is trying to get down as safely and quickly as possible with as little damage to quadriceps as possible by coming down lightly and employing agility. So in every week of training everyone was instructed to be sure they were getting at least 1 or 2 minutes several times a week or doing some dedicated training that was a little bit longer, fewer days a week. But that agility training, the quick steps in, out, in, out, jumping quickly, side and lateral movement, your footers and steps, you know, that are exactly even and predictable, but that are very different And there was not a lot of loose rock, but there were some. So you also had to be prepared in case your footsteps and you, you skid just a little bit. Now, almost none of that happened unless someone was tired, and that's when it will start to happen. So again, it's why we practice with the endurance, but with the strength, with the power. What is power? Power is the combination, remember, of strength, so against resistance, with a bit of speed. When you want to go up and you want to go up repeatedly, yes, that's endurance, but it also takes power to put that foot up and push off from behind. And if you have been practicing that, you will be better. Not necessarily a speed trip, so it's not necessarily the bleacher training, that kind of stair stepping that is going to help you get all of this in, but it is doing that heavier load than your own body weight and doing that to muscular fatigue 2 to 3 times a week. So that was huge. But now let's talk about fueling. This is really, really important. So the higher intensity work that we're going to do, the body needs carbohydrates because it is much more work for the body to use fat and turn that into fuel. And you can do that just fine at lower level activities. So beef stick or beef jerky, almost pure protein, probably a little bit of fat, but almost no carbs. So the advantage of this is it's not gonna spike blood sugar levels. You're taking in protein, not carbohydrates. You're taking in something But again, this is only really to stave off hunger. This is not going to go for fuel, maybe already starting to help prepare. But if you're going for a hike where this is enough, you're not really doing a lot of work or damage, but you may just simply be hungry. Now, the harder or longer you start to go, you may want something like this. This happens to be an Aloha bar. I'm not an affiliate, I don't make any commission from this, I get nothing whatsoever, but I would take Samples, by the way. This one here is like a Girl Scout Thin Mint. By the way, you have been warned, don't put these in the refrigerator. If you're the only one there, you know who's going to eat them. So there's 14 grams of protein, there's 20— and I can't read this— 25 grams of carbohydrate, 26 I think. Wow, when did this happen? And 9 grams of fat. I needed to be really light in order to see. So this is a little bit more balanced, still a little bit more carbohydrate than anything else. There is some protein, but there also is fat, so it's not going to rapidly absorb. So those carbohydrates are going to be there, but you're not going to spike your blood sugar. You're going to stay a little bit more balanced. So if this is helpful to you because you're trying to prevent those spikes, this might be beneficial. And yet it would not be necessarily enough for you to fuel if you were starting to bonk and run out of gas in a long hike. In a long hike like that 16-miler. Now, if we were planning on hours, what is that, you might say? It's a little bit unpredictable. You're not going to be able to set a pace because when you're coming down, you're going to be going a certain pace, and what you're doing is putting the brakes on the way down. You're across the bottom for not all that long, but some of that you're in sand, so you're not going all that fast there either. You're also on the way up starting to already climb. That's where you're going to start slowing down for the first several miles on the way up. It's not completely steep. You are making pretty good time. And on average, you know, I would say I was aiming for at least 2 miles an hour. And if we could just stay consistent, I thought, 2 miles, 2 miles, 2 miles, you know. And now it was— that was just fine, you know, for 11 and 12, and for 13 staying on track, and then 14, and that was okay. And then after that, it was like, no, no. So 14 actually took much longer. 14 took longer. 15 and 16, the last 1.5 miles. Each of those was 30 minutes each, and I probably could have come up a little bit faster personally, but I was waiting for people to peek around the corner. I thought surely I would see somebody, and we kept each getting a little bit slower. But almost everybody needs to go their own pace. If you try to go slower than you should, you're going to pay for that. If you try to go faster than you should, you're going to pay for that. And may not be able to finish cuz you've burnt yourself out. So if there's a certain pace that you know you do well at, you really need to honor what, what that is. And remember that on race day there may be nerves, there may be something you ate that doesn't agree with you because of the nerves. And how you show up on race day is different for everybody as well. So you've gotta honor who are you with? And what are you going to do? Now, I've had marathons where I've run elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder with someone from start to end. We stopped at Kaibos together. We stopped for Gatorade together. We finished pretty much side by side. But that doesn't always happen, you know, and sometimes if somebody's cramping or stopping and needing to, you know, others, ideally there should be some kind of agreement beforehand. What should I do? How are we going to do this? Now, if you think somebody is suffering and they're ill and dealing with heat stroke and you happen to be with them, then obviously you've got a different decision to make in making sure somebody is safe. And that I would suggest you would do for a stranger, right? You wouldn't let somebody suffer. But really important to look at your fuel. So remember again, back to high intensity. So if you're going really high and hard, your body needs carbohydrates. But you may get this one wrong. So if you're going out on a hike and you think, oh, it's just a hike and I'm not— we're not going to be going that fast. But if you're, say, going on a hike at altitude, or you're going at a hike in heat, or you're going at a hike and it's going to be longer than you've ever done and more strenuous, also in heat, you have to start as if this is high intensity from the beginning. So I'll tell you what I did on the Grand Canyon day, and these are two of the bars that I used. So this Beef Stick, by the way, was nowhere to be seen on race day. This wasn't with me during the hike. This was something I think I snacked on maybe in the car on the way up, and I know I had one in the car on the way home. So these are the two bars right now that I'm kind of favoring going back and forth with. This is a Bobo's bar. It's the stuffed chocolate almond butter. Already, right? You want one. So it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate right here. So it's an oat bar, all gluten-free. And yet, if you can't do grains of any kind, you can't do this one, but it is gluten-free and dairy-free. So chocolate almond butter. I don't do peanuts, so this is my preference. Love it. It's not huge, it's small, but it's packed and condensed, so it is a 320-calorie bar. The carbohydrates are fairly high, but it also has enough fat in it. It's got about 8 grams of protein, not a lot, and I can't see that really well, so don't trust me at all. But it's got significant amount of fat in it. So I had liquid, I had a protein shake, just enough to get me started after I'd had some matcha with coconut cream in it.. So I had calories, had a little fat to get me started, but not a lot to eat. So I really wasn't hungry and, and was more worried about force feeding, thinking that wasn't the ideal thing to do. So I just made sure I had a little extra fuel with me and had one of these because there is oats in it. So a little bit like oatmeal. This was the first thing I had as soon as I was like, okay, I can eat something. And that was about an hour into it. So pretty early. So we, we got on the shuttle at 5, we started hiking at 5:30. So one of those down. And then about an hour and a half later, I think I had my first Aloha bar and that's about 220 calories. And these go, they're about 14 grams. I told you again, about 26, 26 grams of carbohydrates. There's 9 grams of fat. So it's a little bit more balanced. Just to keep the blood sugar stable. Now, something interesting I did is wore a continuous blood glucose monitor the entire time because I wanted to see what, what's happening with my blood sugar level. Wanted to know if I could feel it, and I wasn't constantly checking it, but when we would stop for a break, I did check to see, you know, what was it. The only time it really spiked was when my alarm went off really excruciatingly early and I was having coffee before we left, or coffee or matcha, you know, and having that caffeine and, you know, at a time when my body normally likes to be sleeping, if my dog will let me. So that was the only real spike. The rest of the day, my blood sugar was pretty stable. So go figure, right? It's exactly what we preach. You eat, you should move. I was constantly moving and eating. As I needed to regularly and hydrating all the way through. So the rhythm is protein, adequate protein, yes, regularly, carbohydrates for higher intensity, definitely electrolytes. And remembering, remind yourself that when you're going to go for extended days, so if you're coming to a retreat, you'll be reminded You, you know, look, we're gonna hike 8 miles on the first day, but we're gonna do 5 or 6 on the second. We're gonna do 4 or 5 on the third, and we're gonna do another 5 or 6 on the last. You're gonna do this repeatedly. So you have to keep fueling because there is a cumulative effect where a lot of times you're doing your training, you have a long hike, and then you have a recovery day. Whereas we're trying to help you adapt and get to there safely with resilience. But not with an injury or deplete your immune system. So there's a difference in what it is you're going to do. You are going to have a reach and a stretch at an event like a 3 or 4 day challenging retreat. Now, we don't challenge you so much that you go home beat up. You go home, what I like to say, good tired. You've exercised, you've played outside like when you were a kid and you went outside in the morning and you didn't come in until they called you in for lunch or for supper. Either that kind of tired where you take a shower because you're dirty, and then you feel like you've had a detox at a spa because you just had good sweat, sunshine, maybe a little breeze. And you know what I mean, right? All right, so the other thing is, yes, total calories is important, and you have to get familiar with how often do you eat, how much do you eat. So when I was training for Ironman, I knew that I needed about 240 calories. Yeah, and that's not Like, that was very specific, right? 240 calories an hour just to keep on pace. Now, when you start, you're swimming, so you're not taking in anything. So you have to be fueled up before that. Generally, you've had breakfast, like oatmeal or a shake. Then you do your swim, and on the bike, you're starting to eat and take in fluids as soon as you can tolerate it coming up and out of the water. And, you know, looking at 240 calories an hour for as long as you can on that bike, because sooner or later you'll get overheated, you'll be tired, your gut starts to shut down. Similarly on the hike. Now you're not jostling your stomach up and down, so you might wonder, well, why does that happen? Well, because again, the intensity is the cumulative effect of being out there, exposure to elements, whether it's cold or it's heat, the body has to do a lot of extra work cooling you off or keeping you warm either way. And so if you were in Colorado doing a 14er, the more you go up, the colder you're gonna get. Here, you're actually— it's the same in the canyon. You may not realize this, but in the lower part of the canyon, the heat reflects off the walls. So it's actually hotter at the bottom than it is at the top. So it was really only about 90 at the top, and there was a really nice breeze. It wasn't all that warm coming up. It was very tolerable. Now I say that though, coming from Phoenix where we've had summer of 110 as the norm, 105 seemed cool when it was only 100. And if it got to 90s, we were like, oh my gosh, this feels so good. So there's some relevancy here, right? But throughout our country, almost everybody who was here has experienced hot summers. And I think we're all noticing this global warming trend. So, you know, what you have to realize is we were telling everyone, I want you to get down as quickly and efficiently as possible. Stop, pause, take pictures of that beautiful sunrise. And then move yourself on down that hill, because the sooner you get down, that's more in cool and fewer in heat. More miles done early is better. Coming down lightly, not heavily. So again, if you're coming down fairly quickly and light on those feet, using that agility, you're much better off because you won't be doing so much damage. The sore quads in the front of the thighs is from coming down heavy and decelerating so that your knee is also taking some brunt of that. Now, your toes are also jamming into your shoe coming down for 5 or 6 miles. So you want to be sure you don't have really tight shoes. You want to have that little extra half when you have a hiking shoe. If you're debating between 8, 8.5, you always want to go with 8.5. So those of you who've done marathons, you know this, your feet will swell. When they get hot. And so later in the day, in the afternoon, or after several hours, you're going to wish you've had those bigger sizes if you were somewhere in between and you don't lace them up quite so tight. Now, electrolytes are also really important. So again, show and tell. My son's going down here, so I have two things. So Element— so I love this. This is by Robb Wolf designed this. So sodium is 1,000 milligrams, potassium 200, and magnesium 60. Now, there are some people that say this is backwards, this is a little backwards, we need more potassium, and, um, we need— or we need more magnesium, or flipping it is better. And it's, it's an interesting thing that I think some people will adapt to it better. Now, this can go in whatever size water you want. This could go into 32 ounces, or it could go into 24, or it could go into 16. Now it's going to really saturate the 16. It's going to be very salty. Now, if you are like me, when I finished, someone commented— I waited at the top for those that finished later— someone said, oh, look at your skin, you have 'You have something on you.' And I said, 'I know, it's, it's salt. I'm like a French fry.' And that's how I've always been since I was in my early 20s. I spent summers in Louisiana, actually, and my sweat system actually improved because I would start sweating earlier in workouts. And that is an advantage because then your cooling system is working better. Now, it's humid enough in Iowa in the summer, but it's nothing like Louisiana. And those of you who live in the Deep South know what I'm talking about, right? So that was an advantage. But I need probably more salt than 70% of you who might be listening. But you do need to know, and there's actually a sweat test you can take. So you go in and they don't make you work out and sweat, but they force your skin to sweat. And it— you have to sit through it for— I'm not sure quite how long it is at this point. It used to take about an hour, may not take that long anymore, but they will measure the amount of sodium that you sweat so that they can predict per hour here's how much you have. So other ways to take in salt are literally salt, like Celtic salt. It's great. This is a brand designed for athletes, triathletes of any kind, but Base Salt is the brand, and it comes just like this. So it looks like a chapstick thing, but it's actually a flip top. And when you open it up, the salt is inside and it has calcium, it has chloride, it has magnesium and potassium all in it. So what you're doing is you're going to lick your thumb, you're going to put it on top, shake the salt on it, and then lick it. And what you're doing is kind of getting used to how much do I sweat, what's my sweat rate, and what do I need. So They recommend a thumb lick per mile if you're running. So if you run a 6-mile, or, or yeah, 6 miles per hour, 10-minute mile, and that's what you're doing, you know, you can think about this in every 30 minutes. You can do 3 thumb licks if you want to do it that way. I also, on the bike, you're going to take in based on 5 miles. So there's a little timing effect there is really what you're looking at. So how long does it take you to do 5 miles depends on, you know, what your average speed is. So kind of a slow pace for a racer anyway would be 13 miles an hour, pretty slow. But a good pace might be 18, 20. If you're going downhill, you might see 30. But if we're talking really working and pedaling, you know, probably on average maybe 15, 16 miles an hour would be a really good steady pace. So if you're going to take 2 licks per every 5 miles, you know, that might be that you're taking, you know, 3 to 4 licks every half an hour to keep yourself hydrated and salty. You don't wait till the hour and do that, but you remind yourself frequently. You could also put that in your water, but you kind of have to decide and commit. Here's, here's my pattern. You have to have a plan. You have to follow through on that plan. So it's really important that you figure out how many calories do I need per hour and keep up with that. Now, I tried to take in one, one bar about every hour and a half. So it wasn't based on miles, you know, or a distance, but it was based on time because remember, you're going to slow down as you get to the top. If you're climbing up out of the Grand Canyon because the intensity peaks. You're working just as hard even though you're going slower, so you still need that extra fuel. And what's going to happen if you don't? You may say, well, I did it, I didn't, didn't have to, I made it anyway. What you've done is more muscle damage and more to repair, so your fitness level will suffer, as opposed to having the resilience so that you're bouncing back and you're stronger than ever. You will put yourself backward and at a disadvantage if you're without the fuel. The fitness adaptations that you set yourself up to get may not come to you because you didn't fully nurture them with the fuel that you needed. So I hope that makes sense. So if you listen to the podcast on a regular basis, A few weeks ago, one of my guests was Dexter Yates, and we were talking about— she's 8, she's going to be 79, but she's going to be competing in the 80-year-old age bracket. It's a very confusing kind of a story to follow if you're not adapt to age group training and race qualifications. But in talking about, you know, weight or consciousness of you know, training and fueling. And she said, you know, that— and I didn't ask her about her weight or whether she had tried, but she mentioned, you know, it's a very tricky thing. You know, I'd like to be down a few pounds, but it's tricky when you're training, you have to fuel. And I tell you what she said, and I know that she's heard that many times, I'm sure, from coaches throughout the years, coaches and, and other athletes that she's worked with. And women need to hear that years in doing endurance events is not a great weight loss strategy, by the way. If you want weight loss, that's not a way to do it. You in fact may gain weight, and it may be stress weight from the elevation of cortisol. But important that you're fueling, and if you weren't fueling, you added stress that would not have needed to be there. And your fitness level may be better, and body composition may be better, had you eaten better, more carbohydrates, more regularly eaten during. Here's where one thing happens that can be very difficult, maybe not taking hiking seriously because, well, it's hiking, it's walking, right? But again, remember, distance ends up being intensity. If you're going beyond an hour, cortisol starts to rise. We have to offset that with carbohydrates for fuel, and you have to be prepared. Slower runners, hikers, walkers, for going a certain distance, struggle more. They struggle as much or more as someone who won the race and went high and hard at really high intensity. So that— it's the Goldilocks in between that they're the sweet spot. You know, they were the most comfortable. It was the easiest for them to fuel, or they did fuel, and so they did the best. But these two extremes, if you're going really slowly and/or you are not fueling appropriately, or you're going really hard and very hard when your body is going that quickly to eat and fuel. So there's a lot of damage in both cases if you're on those ends of the spectrum. So doing all the training is very important, not skipping or skimping. On the strength, on the power, on the agility, making sure you're taking in everything that you need and before you need it. This is not really about hunger because your body may tell you, no, I don't want any. You do. And there can be gut work issue that happens, and part of that may happen because of something you haven't considered. Not necessarily is it what you've eaten on race day or electrolytes, but it may be that your gut is already struggling with an issue and something that you're taking in is actually causing the needle in a haystack challenge that you're experiencing. So gut issues often happen because midlife hormonal changes occur, and the way you've always eaten potentially won't work for you anymore. So gut health issues due to food sensitivities, and some of you are newer to this than others, but dairy, gluten, wheat, and I separate those two because there's gluten in many other things in addition to wheat, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts, and then I'm gonna mention alcohol and sugar. And, and we're talking not necessarily naturally occurring sugars in fruits, but if you eat them alone, they can be problematic and spike blood sugar. But the sugars that come in simple sugars or, or simple excess starches, carbohydrates, yes, we need them. But ideally resistant starches is the kind you're eating, those healthier carbs like beans and legumes and sweet potatoes, winter squashes. And berries or citrus if you're choosing to go with fruit. So the goal with your nutrition is to plan it, to pace it, and then stick with it no matter what your brain tells you to do, and/or have a partner who's right there to keep you honest and have you do it. Remember, high intensity demands carbs and protein, both. The higher intensity and the more tired you are, the more purely carbohydrate you want. Someone said yesterday they were snacking on dates and, and passed it off as, you know, a Middle Eastern thing. And I said, no, no, you know, dates are notorious, you know, as they don't spike blood sugar as badly as other dried fruit does. However, they also might not get right into your blood system. You need to have tried them, tested them, been used to them, and they work fine for you on long hikes. You wouldn't necessarily do that on hike day, the long hike day, if you hadn't tested them first, nothing new on race day. So that's just an important thing to remember. But let's say you're trying to use electrolytes, that doesn't work for you. It seems to go badly. It may not be the electrolytes that went badly. It may be that you had dairy the night before, you had gluten or wheat the night before. Maybe it was eggs or corn or something else. And that is still in your gut and triggering issues and challenges. So for any of you who might be listening who haven't done an elimination diet, if you're dealing with constipation, I know a lot of hands just went up, with diarrhea, with gas, or with bloating. And even if you're not, that's the kicker. You could be asymptomatic, not having any problems, and still have a leaky gut, and for that reason have weight loss resistance. So leaky gut basically means some poop is getting into your bloodstream because large particles of food are making it there and not getting fully digested because we've had some permeation of the gut lining with inflammation due to some of these foods. And you don't know unless you completely eliminate them. Always I have somebody in the room say, but I don't eat— I don't have that very often. I don't have it very much. But it doesn't matter. We send people to the hospital for an IV drip of teeny tiny little bits of medicine dripping into their bloodstream. Well, when you have just a little bit of it, sometimes that's exactly what you're doing, putting an IV drip in your system Keeping it there, keeping the level there, just even with those little bits. So you're still sabotaging your body. You have to completely clean it out, stop it, get it out, treat it like you're allergic to it. You're an alcoholic, you can't have alcohol at all. And I don't mean alcohol specifically, but I mean the dairy and the gluten and the wheat. I mean, looking everywhere, is it an ingredient in things? Is it, you know, your cheese, your yogurt, your cream, your dairy, your buttermilk, your butter? All of those things would need to go and you'd need to figure out what foods will I miss the most? How can I make them in an alternative way? And there's just about a substitute or recipe for anything that you want and would miss. So you don't have to miss out. You may just have to get used to doing things slightly differently for a short period of time, but it may be worth it. It's worth doing a reintroduction if you can do that and you're not sure what happens. But when you start training at higher intensities, you often will find that this is common, that your gut starts to kind of rebel, and it's because you've turned up the volume. Something that didn't bother you before may bother you now. So I want to go back and I just want to summarize that, you know, how important it is that it's power, it's strength, it's agility training. It is very, very important. Miles alone won't get you there. So coming from flatland to altitude is possible. Athletes do this all the time. Coming from heat work to heat and humidity in the tropics from mild climates in the north is possible. Getting the body adapted to stress is the key. Heavy legs followed by a long hike, meaning heavyweight training for legs followed by a long hike partially with a weighted vest. This is one way. Plyometrics preceding a hike, another way not to have to get the super long distance but yet to get the distance. Heavy resistance on a bike before a run— those are ways to pre-fatigue your muscles, not have to do excessive mileage. Especially if, for instance, this summer I couldn't do mileage. In the time of day that I could go and hike, it was already 105, you know, and so that would have been not a smart choice. And, and even those of us who are stubborn, you know, decide not to do that. But these are the things that I did because time didn't permit me to do the training and the mileage. So I really didn't put in the full mileage. I was the most undertrained there, and yet it worked because I had the strength and the power and the agility in order to get there. So I hope this has been helpful. I hope it's been inspiring, and I hope you realize that you're not too old. You may be not trained for this, but you can get trained for this and potentially be in the best shape you've ever been in and have it be a lot more fun and inspired and come with a view. So if you are even thinking about it, we have hikes planned for next year that include Phoenix. So the total unplugged in a ranch. There is Boulder, Colorado, not to be missed, by the way. It's glorious. It's beautiful. It's beyond. It's home for me. And there's Moab. We haven't talked much about that yet, but that comes later in the fall. And there is the Grand Canyon for those who choose to do the adventure. Let me know if you're interested and we'll put links to those early bird rates that are disappearing very soon in the show notes. What are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 together. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife women. So go and listen right now. Do you have a question? For a podcast, a question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell. 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