Everything Triathletes Need To Know About Nutrition/Fuel (With Dr Harry)

This podcast is brought to you by Trivalo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Today's episode of the podcast, we had a very special guest. He's been on the podcast many times before, and that is Dr. Harry Weisinger, my performance doctor. And he came on to chat all things nutrition. He is, and our resident nutrition expert. He helps athletes get in shape, lose some weight, and more importantly, fuel properly for whatever their race is, whether that's a short cycling race or a long endurance event, such as a triathlon 70.3 or even up to Ironman. And as always, we find these chats incredibly invaluable. We love the way Harry is able to articulate himself and articulate his points. It just gets you to think about things in a really easy and logical manner. So we can, without a doubt, this is just another chat we've had with Harry that you will absolutely enjoy. So without further ado, I mean, we touched on everything from the biggest thing that Harry has been working on so far and experimenting on, which is a very unique topic, his experience with an endurance event himself and how he prepared for it. More specifically, a calorie calculator to work out how many calories you need for a specific endurance event, what the difference is between fueling for high intensity events and longer duration events, difference in quality of foods we talked about. We touched on low GI versus high gi, low fiber versus high fiber in relation to different events and just your meal plan in general and how he's best helping his patients get the best outcomes in just either their diet or their racing performance. So please look forward to. We hope you enjoy the chat. Okay, we've got Dr. Harry, the my performance doctor back on the podcast for a third time, a record third time for our guests so far, and they are without a doubt the most this two episodes. So, Dr. Harry, welcome back to the podcast.

Pleasure to be back, George. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So we normally start our normal episodes with some gratitude and we don't do it with every single guest, but with certain guests we still do. And Dr. Harry was kind enough to get involved with the gratitude. So we're going to go around and do our own gratitude today and we ask you to ask yourself, what are you grateful for for the week? So dad, welcome to the episode. You can start us off. What are you grateful for?

Thanks, Jordan. And good to see you again, Harry. Really love these episodes with you is so much gold nuggets being thrown by you, which the listeners absolutely love. And that sort of follows on with my gratitude. It's amazing to me how many people we've interviewed over the journey and how willing they are to share their knowledge and, and they're not getting anything out of it except the knowledge that they are helping other people who are listening. And I just think it's brilliant that guys like you, Harry, are so willing to come on board and share stuff that you know that will help the listeners be better athletes by fueling correctly. So, yeah, that's my gratitude.

I totally second that. Great one, Harry. You can go next. Your gratitude.

Well, I just, If I could just start in response to Geri, you know, the reason to become a doctor is really to the desire to help people. And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, the origin of the word doctor actually comes from an ancient word for teacher. So it's all part of the. It's all part of it for me. I love, I do love, I love talking, as you know, and, and I do like to teach and, and of course, when you teach someone, you learn yourself, you know, because you have to assimilate that information in your brain to be able to convey it to someone else. So it's my absolute pleasure, as always, to be on gratitude. Well, I have a few, actually. I'll try and be. I'll try and be brief and succinct. I'll start off with a. With a bit of a strange one out of left field. You could say I'm grateful for baseball. I know it sounds weird, but when I was a teenager, I played baseball competitively. I was reasonably good, actually, which explains the fact I didn't find endurance sports till way later and I let it slip into my past. And more recently, just through chance, I started taking an interest in the Major League Baseball. And we're now able to watch baseball games. And I know you guys have avid sports fans, but I can watch major league games every day if I wanted and had the time for like $30 for the year. And it's rekindled my interest. It's actually settled me down to have something like this that I can look at for a few minutes every day. I'm following a team. I've followed the Yankees since I was 15 and now I'm watching games. I've got my kids, you know, taking some interest in it. And I'm really grateful that the technology's enabled Sports fans like me to be able to tap into that. Maybe a less selfish gratitude is I'm grateful for science. Science has got us to where we are. Science is the reason we don't die at 30 years of age. We die our life expectancy now and our quality of life is different because of science. It's the reason you can jump on a plane and be in a different continent. It's the reason we can sit here having a conversation despite being in three separate places. That's science. Science is uncontroversial. It's indisputable. And I'm sorry if I'm sort of taking your platform, but I really, if there's anyone in doubt, if there's anyone with any doubt that the science behind the effort to control Covid, which is, let's face it, it's basically throwing a real spanner in the, in the works of everyone's lives. Just from my perspective, and this isn't a, this is not a political statement, this is a statement where I just want to be clear from my perspective as a citizen and as a doctor, that the science of vaccines is robust. As I said, we have long relied on vaccines, and these vaccines have been in the pipeline for a decade. They weren't invented overnight. They've been put in the arms of now hundreds of millions of people. So if you're wondering if they're safe or well tested, wonder no more. There's never been any drug tested this well in the history of humankind. And also, if problems were to appear, they'd appear really quickly. So we know what problems occur, we know the frequency that they occur, and we know how to treat them. And again, as far as I'm concerned, it's uncontroversial. This is not a political statement, but just for people that are, are curious. And I've had some patients ask me about vaccines and whether they should get them. You're choosing between the risk of basically having an adverse effect to Covid versus having an adverse effect to a vaccine. That's the choice you're making. It's not the risk of the vaccine versus nothing. And so I just wanted to be crystal clear, and I am grateful for the hard work of the scientists and all the, all the medical professionals for helping this push. And I hope that people do come around and we get a high vaccination rate, which will allow us to move back to a normal life so that we're not racing on Zwift and we're out racing in the real world. So that's What I'm grateful for, Jordan.

Two cracking points, Harry, and we don't mind you using this platform at all to share that message because we couldn't agree anymore. So, yeah, two brilliant points to start and a little bit off track here, but I know that you are a little bit of a philosopher yourself. And am I right in saying that you find value in stoic philosophy, which is very similar to where something like gratitude comes from?

Absolutely. I mean, and I, you know, it's interesting listening to you guys. It's interesting listening to you guys talk about motivation. And when I was listening to your podcast on motivation, it gelled with me completely because you do take a very stoic philosophy. And I know Jerry can't help but be stoic in his approach. When your motivation is low, simply ask yourself, what if this was the last time that I ever got to, you know, eat ice cream, ride my bike, see my friends? It changes your mindset instantly. And, yeah, I use it's. I use that approach which has, you know, come to be known as the stoic philosophy. I use it now more than ever with the challenges that we are going through. I don't, I don't think I can overstate how big an impact the last 18 months has had on my life, you know, from a mental health point of view. I've never been, you know, within Q E of a mental health issue. But I tell you what, the last 18 months has pushed me right to the brink. And I. And I've got it good, know, relative to so many others, you know, I. I'm in good health and, you know, well off, and I get to do what I want for a job and recreationally, and I've got a great family, and I've had it tough. So I know people are doing it tough, and sometimes the only way to get through it is to have. Have an approach to help change your mindset. And I think stoicism is a good start. So if your listeners haven't had a proper look at that approach, they really should because it is very valuable in promoting gratitude.

I agree. And for my gratitude, I'm going to come full circle and bring it back to Dad. I am grateful that you are my coach as well as my dad, obviously. Recently I've been on a new bike, and when I got on it, my watts were a lot lower than on my. My other bike. And there's a big ego blow. And over the last month, I've really leaned on you as a coach to try and get me back on track, and I'M really feeling more and more informed as every week goes by. And I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I tell all our athletes not to question the super coach, just follow the process. And I think I question you the most. And each week we look at our training, my training program, and I say, are you sure about this or what should we do here? Yet you always come up with a session that is extremely valuable and is obviously helping me get better. So that's my gratitude for this podcast episode.

Well, that's been an interesting start to our program and I love it. It's fantastic. Your observations, Harry, as usual, spot on. And. And, yeah, you know, we're all being challenged, aren't we? Like we've never been challenged before. And your ability to keep your head whilst other people are losing their minds is probably the biggest thing I'm learning in the last two years is to, you know, is to. I've kept saying it so much along this journey, you know, adapt or get left behind. And you don't want to be one of those people who are getting left behind, but you need help and everybody needs help because it's not that easy. I'm making it very simple here. You know, people are challenged in different degrees, and some are being challenged 100% of the time, and some of us have been challenged 1% of the time, and everybody's in the section between the 100 and the 1. And we've just got to really be a bit more caring with each other, I think, and a little bit more helpful to get people through these periods. I think that's one thing we're learning is it's not black and white all the time. You know, you either can't train or you can train. It's not as simple as that. You know, there's so many things that are actually in each. Each person's life that are affecting decision making. And at the end of the day, you are in charge of your own decisions and you are in charge of your own outcomes. And if you. If you're having trouble with that, that's what you need to reach out. And I think that's the message that I think I certainly have learned that. I was a bit of a harsh taskmaster, I think, but I've definitely learnt a lot myself in the last two years about being more amicable to other versions of things and having to adapt and be creative and trying to. Okay, we can't achieve that. Let's try this angle. Looking at things from different perspective and. And not being so black and white, I think that's a really good thing to have learned in my journey in the last two years.

I think.

I think it's really good to be vulnerable and to be able to accept that you don't know everything and that you're learning on the journey just as much as everybody else is, who is struggling as much. And it's funny, you only learn about yourself more when you struggle more, and that's when you look back and go, wow. And if I look at you, Harry, and I know probably want to talk about this, you know, you say you've been challenged, but, you know, I look at what you've achieved in these last two years, you know, you've got yourself to the fittest point you've ever been in your cycling career, and you finished the Melbourne to warning, which is one of the most challenging events that anybody on a bike can do. And not only did you finish it, you finished it in the time that you expected. The condition that you, you know, that you pushed yourself to that point where you've got to look back and say, that's one of the most best achievements you've ever done, except for the one that's sitting over your left shoulder with the Aussie jersey. So in this period, you've done those two key things. And the thing I want to get across is, yes, we've been challenged. Yes, it's a hard period, but look at what you've done in that two years. It's outstanding. And they're the things we need to be looking at and not the negative things about how shit things are at the moment. You know, there's. There's always a good thing coming out of every negative thing. You've just got to find it.

Yeah, I think. I think, Jerry, to that point, what. Just reflecting on the. The group, the Trivella group, it. Because so much of what we experience is related to our mindset. You know, you can change how you feel by changing your mindset. I think we've all done that. You know, you get a little bit of bad. You get a little bit of bad news, and you feel worse, physically feel worse. You get a little bit of good news or a, you know, a bit of a win, and you feel better. So we know the relationship between mindset and our experience of how we feel. So we're tracking along in this indisputably shit period in the world, and then you surround yourself with people that are seemingly pretending everything is normal, which is the guys I train with yourself and the Guys I train with and they don't know that I'm just pretending and I don't know that they're just pretending. But end of the day, all of our mindsets change and then it feels like everything's all right. And this is, this is not, this was not an accident. And it certainly explains, you know, speaking for my own achievements and I consider myself to be possibly the luckiest cyclists on earth to have achieved them, those things. But as I said, I think the collective mentality of just come on, keep pushing on, we can't control that, but we can control this. But stay as fit as we can. All right, we'll race indoors instead. Oh, the door's open. And now we, now we can race in the Nationals, now we can race in the warning, etc. And I think that's. I think that's been super valuable for me. I couldn't possibly have achieved what I did without the coaching group, the group of people that I trained with. But anyway, enough about me.

On that note, let's get into some of the meat of the episode. And it's funny, given the context of the kind of chat we've had in this first 15 minutes of the conversation, you take a step back and it's almost a higher level type of conversation when you're thinking about the broader context of life, when you start to talk about trivial things that we can sometimes put so much stress over, like your diet, like your weight, like your nutrition can seem a little bit insignificant in context. But also this is a really fun and interesting topic to talk about. So we want to get into it and it is a really helpful topic for a lot of people. So we're very curious to know, Harry, what have you recently been experimenting with, researching, working on? We're curious to dive right into that.

Well, as you know, Jord, I've. With respect to experimenting and I, I experiment a fair bit on myself, as you know.

Yeah.

The last three months I haven't been all that well, to be honest, in general, so I haven't. I haven't really done much, except I. Last year I started doing some research on the effect of sauna on wellness and longevity and athletic performance. I took an interest and I was lucky enough to be in a position to order a sauna.

Tell me it's in the bedroom as well.

It's out the back. Yeah. They're not as expensive as you think, but they do take a long time to come from wherever they're coming from. So I got myself a Finnish sauna. Now the background to this is that for quite a while now there's been research into the effect of sauna on cardiovascular disease risk, sudden cardiac death and all cause mortality. So dying of any cause. And there was a, there's a quite famous study that was done in Finland and it took middle aged blokes, thousands of them in fact, and followed them for 20 years and broke these guys into groups that. Because everyone in Finland has a sauna, so you can't have no sauna and the, no sauna group and the sauna group, you have the. Doesn't sauna very much group and the saunas quite a bit and then the saunas all the time group. And it turns out that having a sauna four times a week for 20 minutes lowers your risk of cardiovascular disease and death by over half. Now that, I just want to point this out, that is a greater effect than any drug that's ever been tried. So it's profound now. So I got attracted to this because I'm interested in living to 100 despite a very dodgy set of genes and so forth. And you know, you've got to ask what, what on earth is sauna doing? To, to explain this. Alongside that there's. I had a friend that worked for the Cats and he was telling me one time that in the preseason they would get the players to do. They'd get on the ergo so on a bike and they put them in the hot. So they put them in a humid room with hot air blowing on them and they just get them to pedal at 150, 200 watts. And I asked him, you know, why, why would you do this to your footy players? And he said, well, it increases their full blood count better than anything we can give them legally. And that's what the studies show, is that it expands your plasma volume, which is a critical metric in athletic performance. So the more blood you've got, the more oxygen you can carry. And there have been quite a number of studies, particularly in things like cross country skiing, but also there have been studies in running and cycling that demonstrate that sauna after exercise and just a few exposures to this increases athletic performance. So that's what I've been looking at lately. I'm early in my experiment, so I've had this thing in my backyard now for about a month. I've used it every day. I can't say breaking any records yet, but again, that's, that's due to other problems. But that's what I'm working on at the moment.

And Is, is, is the 20 minutes important? Because I know a lot of people go into an hour sauna. Is that too long?

And this is in the, in the sauna, in the, in at the appropriate temperature. I don't think you could stay in for an hour. I mean, you could, some might, but I'm ready. I, it feels like, it feels like an FTP test that, that's the discomfort. At the 20 minute mark, I'm ready to, I'm ready to barge out of the room. So at somewhere between 80 and 110 degrees in the sauna and about, I don't know what percent humidity, but pretty humid because you put the water on the, on the heater.

Yeah, that's fine because I don't, I don't see many public saunas above, you know, 75.

So yeah, I think, I think 75 is manageable. But to your question, the answer is yes. So if you do under 20 minutes, it doesn't seem to have quite as strong a benefit. And, and look, it's, if you've had sauna, you know, it's stressing you like exercise. It's so, so I don't know whether the effect compounds on top of what exercise we're doing, but I know my heart rate after 20 minutes of sauna is, is the same as it is hard tempo, right on a bike. So it's not insignificant. And your body has to adapt. If it keeps getting challenged with this, it has to adapt and does that we know, by increasing blood count and, and vascularity. And clearly this is significant. You could not find such substantial effects on cardiovascular disease and mortality if it wasn't real.

And did the study compare four times to once or twice per week compared to six to seven times per week?

It did, it did. So the more frequent and the longer that people had sauna, the higher the effect on their cardiovascular disease.

Did they, Harry, just putting my coach's hat on here. Did they have any athletes in terms of performance do this trial and then look at how it was affecting their actual training in that period?

They didn't classify by athletes or not. They just took all comers. So I can't answer that. But there have been separate studies on athletes, specifically on well trained cyclists. Look, the jury's, the jury's out on this. If it is a, if it is an effect, it's not going to be, it's not going to be massive. But as we all know, everyone that watched the Olympic time trial knows that we don't need a big effect to make the difference. Between getting dropped, staying on, winning, the whole. The gap between first and last could be 2%. Right. So who knows?

Great point. Did you have a question, Dad?

I did. And look, we talk a lot about how the body copes and adapts to new stresses and stimulus and this is something that you have put on yourself willingly because you are such an experimenter. And do you think it's had a detrimental effect on what's been happening to you in the last two months? And you did mention briefly that you felt you've had a little bit of a period where you're struggling a little bit. Healthy wise, Is it a coincidence that this is when you started your. We're doing a little experiment here. Have you thought about this?

Yeah, of course I have. No, it. Me not being well predates sauna, so. Good question. If anything, I feel more well from it. And again, it's a really strange run and I know all your listeners can relate. There's no doubt that every athlete can relate to this. As a human, I feel fine walking up and down the street, you know, having a cup of coffee. I feel 100% normal, perfect. It's just when I get on a bike, I can tell I'm not quite right, so.

So scientifically would it be that your body's taking its time to adapt to. To what stresses you're putting it under, which has been. That's the only different thing that's happened here?

Well, it is, except I've also been unwell.

Yeah.

Is there an adaptation period that's kind of.

Oh, yeah, no, no doubt, no doubt. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm in the running in phase and unfortunately there's nothing much in the way of competition at the moment. Um, so I've got a little bit of time to adapt like most of us.

So I want to talk about your last competition that you did and dad touched on it before and that was the last race you had, which was the warning and you completed that epic race. And talk to us about what did you learn from that experience? How did your body adapt and get through that as a whole? And specifically, what did you learn with nutrition on that day?

Oh, well, it's one of the most significant projects that I've ever taken on. It's just a massive. It's an epic race.

As you know, we need to. For those who don't know what we're talking about, the Melbourne to Warrnambool is historically the second oldest ever road race in the world and it used to be the longest until Milan San Remo out dipped it by 2 or 3 kilometers and now it's been reduced to 267k, which is still very significant day on the bike, plus 3,000 meters, maybe 2, 2 to 3,000 meters, something like that. And it is probably one of the sought after events in Australia for those who don't know anything about the Melbourne to Warrnambool. That is what the event is and that's what Harry got himself over the line with.

Yeah, it's a, it is a, it's an adventure to get to the start line. It's an adventure once you, once you're in the race, obviously, you know, it is a, it is a event sort of steeped in history. It used to be the Warrnambool to Melbourne. It used to be a handicap. It's got some great history. There's a book written about it actually, which I bought after finishing it, which is, which is really very interesting. And some of the, some of the names, you look through the honour roll and some names of familiar, some very famous races that have, that have, you know, done and won. The warning. Look, what can I say before, Before I took on the project of the Melbourne to Warrnambool, and that's a whole story in itself. I, in my whole cycling lifetime, which is, you know, seven, eight, nine years long now, I'd done one 200k ride, but at sort of, you know, it took all day with my mates and we were stopping for coffee and beer and what have you. And, you know, that was a long time ago. I'd probably done a handful of 150k rides in my life and next thing I knew, I was embarking on, on a weekly basis of 6 to 8 hours, 180, 260k rides. So just to, just to. I couldn't fathom before that even being able to do the race, even being able to line up at the race, I couldn't fathom. And I remember there are a few of us in Trivelo that started texting each other. When they rescheduled the warning and made it possible for us to be able to do it, we started texting each other. Thinking about the warning, thinking about the warning. And I said, I'm gonna, I said to them, I'm gonna text Jerry and talk to him about training requirements before I commit. And they were all like, no, you're not doing that. Commit first, commit first and then find out what you have to do. And I went, all right, fine. And so had you known what you.

Had to do, would you have not.

Committed which leads me to the point about the importance of having mates and a coach and better still, both taking on such a project. I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it without mates and a coach and both. And I learned apart from that, the importance of doing these big sessions, the main sessions, and how every session added up. And in the end, you look back after six, eight weeks of training and you've trained in the hills, you've trained in the heat, you've trained in the rain, you've trained behind the scooter and consistency and intensity and all that stuff was all part of it. So I learned. I learned the importance of those things and how they could get my body ready to embark on such a race, because, as I said, I'm not naturally. I don't think I'm naturally able to do such things. It seemed curious to me that I'd even be able to do the melbourne to Warrnambool at 50 years of age with not as good a cycling and athletic pedigree as my friends and yourselves. But, yeah, having done those sessions really got me to the point where, as it turned out, I could do the race. What else did I learn? Look, I got very lucky on the day. I think the conditions favored me perfectly. The weather, the way the race unfolded, the way the groups formed, where I got positioned, perfect. But as I was saying to our common friend Julian, how lucky I am he. And he came up with some. One of his usual quips. I can't remember the exact one, but yeah, it would have been along the lines of, the harder you train, the lucky you get, or something like that. What's his most famous one? If you want the biscuit, you're going to have to risk it. Something like that.

It's funny, as you were saying that Dad's dad, one of Dad's favorite ones, came to mind, which was just simply, fortune favors the brave, right?

Exactly. So, anyway, I learned that. The other thing I learned, and this is, won't be wasted on you, is the planning. How important and how fun the planning was. You know, the few of us that were doing this, and of course we had Joe doing Grafton the following week. So we had a group of four of us that were. That were planning for these long races.

And.

How important it turned out to plan with people that had done the race and that were thinking about the race. This was so important. And in the end, if any of us didn't have a plan, we were stuffed. There's no way you can finish that sort of race, that sort of project without a plan. And then in terms of preparation, you know, we prepared for everything. I prepared to the point where I was basically, you know, on rollers, you know, practicing, being put off balance and recovery because I was anticipating I'm going to get pushed. And we, we planned on how to take a feedback and we went to the velodrome and we practiced with precise waiting in the feedback, we figured out where the knot had to be on our musettes. This was the level of detail. And I joked at the time, but I'm not kidding. I was more stressed about this than my medical school exams. But again, had we not prepared like that, it could have all come undone as it did for two guys in front of me that hadn't clearly hadn't practiced their feed bags and went over the bars right in front of me at feed zone three. So got to prepare, gotta have a plan, gotta talk to people that have done it and if you can, have a group of friends and a coach that are all in your corner, so valuable. So that's my experience with the warning and just an amazing, just an amazing experience. I mean the whole thing, right from the decision through to completing the race and now thinking back on it, wondering how I did it. You know, it's, it's quite a, quite a thing.

It's an epic story. And we will have a lot of Ironman athletes dying to know what was your nutrition plan? Because it is a very long race. You know, 260, 270Ks, as long as an Ironman will be a bit longer, obviously, and bit less intensity, but.

Yep.

What was your nutrition plan?

Okay, it starts with a calculator, believe it or not. And this is, this is my approach. I'm not saying it's the only approach. There are definitely, yeah, you can do it by feel. We know, we know cyclists that can ride for what feels looks like 6 hours on a bidden. It looks that way to, you know, you know, Jam O and a few of these other guys, they don't ever seem to eat or drink and yet they can go for hours and hours. And I don't think that's the, that's not the normal situation. I start with a calculator and I work out how much energy is going to be needed to complete this event. Now, how do you get a number for that? Well, look at your Garmin. Look at training peaks, look at Strava. Look at. Just get a, get a feel for anything or, or assume it's 800 calories an hour. For X hours. So I went, all right, if it's, if the hammer's down, it's 800 calories an hour. That's what I'm going to burn. Seven hour race.

Right?

5,600 calories, that's the requirement. Somewhere somehow my body's going to use that. Now hopefully, hopefully I can supply my muscles with that number of calories. Then you can, then you start making some assumptions that because you, you couldn't now think about 5,600 calories, that's two days worth of food. Okay, so the average person is eating around 3,000 calories a day. So am I really going to sit down to breakfast, lunch and dinner twice while I'm on a bike in a race? No, you're not and you don't have to. So you can make some assumptions about what you've already got on board in, in your body because you don't have to eat all the calories you're going to use. So one rule of thumb that has been used, the simple way is to go I need to supply my body with 25% of the calories I'm going to consume and I need to do that across the period just before and during the event. That's a simplistic approach. I think it only works for I, I think that tops out at about three hours, maybe four hours. So I don't think that, I think that works for training, but it doesn't work for a long race like this or an Ironman. You need to be a little bit more sophisticated with Ironman. I would think so. Starting with, you know, five, five and a half thousand calorie requirement. You say, all right, I've got glycogen, which is stored sugar. Now we've all got let's say 2000 calories of stored glycogen and the body is not going to let you cough up the last 500 probably. So I made the assumption 1500 calories is available as stored sugar. All right. I also made some assumptions about the way the race would go down itself. It should be immediately obvious that you cannot go full gas for seven hours and no race ever does. So there are going to be periods where you're riding easy or tempo and at those points in the race you're not relying on carbohydrate in the same way that you are at high intensity. So those times you can burn fat. And certainly well trained athletes, and I mean well trained as in has been training for a few months, can access fat stores on their body and I estimated that over the course of the race I would be able to Access probably about 1500 calories from fat being being times in the race where I wasn't using glycogen and that the intensity was low enough to use fat. So I'm up to 3,000.

Right.

So I need another two and a half thousand calories over, over a seven hour period and, and can include just beforehand because whatever you eat on the start line starts to be digested in the race itself. So you could have 300 calories in your warmup. So in the end, you know, it was something like 2000 calories or thereabouts. You want to put a little bit in your bidding, but not, you don't want to make the bidding too sweet or too sticky because that impedes water absorption when it gets too caloric. Calorific. And I basically advocate and, and again, this is just my approach. There are many different approaches and I know what works for Jerry doesn't work for me and probably vice versa. But I start with the principle of start with real food and then move towards increasingly artificial food where it's, it's just, it's just calories in the form of a gel. So I, I started with things like fruitcake and rice balls and dates and bananas and what have you and worked my way through two bars and then ultimately at the end, gels. I, I also took the approach of eating every 30 minutes, 30 to 40 minutes to space it out, not tax my gut too much. And keeping in mind that where there was opportunity, I took it because in a race like the warning, it can get hairy very quickly. And, and so you've got to take your chances when you get them. So that, that was my approach for calories. As far as electrolyte goes, that depends very much on the temperature on the day. And, but a reasonable rule, rule of thumb is, you know, something like a bid in an hour is ideal if you can get through it. Most people can't. So if you, if you're just aiming for that and get close, I dropped my first bidding and happened to have packed a little 250 mil sort of juice popper full of water and got through that. So, you know, six, seven bins over the race is probably about right. Electrolytes, My approach is 4 to 1 sodium to potassium, magnesium seems to help cramping. So if you can get, you can either put that in, get a formula that does it, or you can take salt tablets specifically. That's important. And then I had on me a 50 mil bottle of pickle juice. Because I just had with my motor pacing sessions a few other times at the end of the training I'd been cramping and I just don't think you can, you know, you're putting your body under pressure in a long event like that and cramping can be a problem. So I brought this pickle juice and lo and behold, I started cramping at the 50 kilometer mark, which I've never done ever in my life. And I sucked on this pickle juice a drop at a time I reckon, for the next 220ks, and got through the race just. But pickle juice is a curious, is a curious but effective treatment which more, more and more people are starting to appreciate. It works. So anyway, that's, that's my potted version of fueling for long fueling for sort of longer events. It would be similar obviously for an ironman, but, but probably less periods of super high intensity, obviously, but a longer duration race. So that would need to be taken into account. And again, these ironmen often are run in parts of the year and parts of the world that are hot. So that's another consideration as well in terms of fluid and electrolytes, in terms.

Of looking back and in hindsight, your plan and your execution. Would you do something different with your nutrition now that you've had the experience of understanding the intensity at the start and the lulls in the middle and everything you did, were you really happy with how it panned out?

Absolutely. Yep. That one I got right.

Fantastic.

That one I got right.

The second question is, you obviously were instructed early on that whatever you're going to do on race day, you need to practice right from your very first long session and really learn what's going to gel with, to use a pun, with your stomach. And obviously the race has intensity that we can't match early on because actually we do ride with the NRS riders at the start of this race and that is something that people often forget when they're doing this event, that you're riding with the best young riders who are probably going to get pro tours in Europe and we are masters riders riding with them on the start line for the first two minutes if you can hang on or two hours or however long you can hang on for. So the requirements and intensity are quite incredible throughout the day. So.

Absolutely. No, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change anything I did there. We did get it right. It's, it's reasonably easy at the start and the biggest Challenge is just concentrating, it's mentally taxing. I know Joe always said he felt more mentally exhausted at the end of the race and physically and that was certainly true. Just the, just the number of people at your shoulders, at your bars and the, and the things like the gap would open and it would close literally in one second. So it takes a little while to get your head around filling that gap yourself. Moving up, moving up, moving up. And I remember getting to the front going oh wow. I got to the front and I was sort of feeling happy about it and now I looked up and I was at the back again literally in what felt like 10 seconds. That, that was quite a thing. But also the way we prepared was we knew the start would be a high concentration period but not, but flat and not necessarily all that hard. You'd be in the draft, no problem and then it would get hard. So our efforts were as we train for, we have that running period where our group trains at sort of tempo sub threshold. Then we have a high intensity period and then hang on and get the rest of the way there. So I think we trained as closely as we could to the way the event would go. Of course you can't predict every situation but in just thinking through the plan it enables you to come up with at least a few solutions along the way.

This is extremely valuable information and it is a major problem for Ironman athletes and even half Ironman that they are either over nutritioning themselves, if that's a word, or underfeeding themselves. And it's quite, it's a lot more common than people think to over hydrate and overfeed themselves because you hear so much about the importance of nutrition and so to get even just some sort of numbers like you're saying now is really valuable. I want you to comment on that but I have some follow up questions and my first one is in that bit in an hour of electrolytes. Yep. So that, that is water with, with some sort of sodium ratio of four to one of electrolytes.

Yeah.

Correct. It's a sachet of hydrolyte or something.

Something like, I mean I used hydrolyte and I used one from scratch labs which seemed to have a reasonable mix for me. But again just on this point, and this is, this is fundamental, whatever, it's a, it's a stupid, it's not a stupid rule. It's the most valuable rule for anyone out there. Never try anything for the first time on race day. Right. That's not that it should be obvious and yet so Many people do. And so many people like me attempted to try something new on race day. Because you heard about it, because you're researching it right up to the race. If you haven't tried it weeks out, don't do it on race day. And we, you know, the, the guys that were preparing practiced everything, including how much stuff to put in your bottle and could you stomach the food? You know, we, we had rice ball recipes going between us and, and, and I practiced for weeks wrapping rice balls and, and eating them like I had. Because again, you've got one hand on the bar and you've got another hand fishing around. So everything. If you hadn't even thought about where you're going to put your stuff in your pockets, I mean, mind you, you think I'm bad. Richard Harris, he has spreadsheet. Right. So, but again, this is, this is brilliant preparation and again, surrounding yourself with guys that they don't trip, you know, it's not trivial. This information, thought in advance will save your race. It will make your race. So anyway, I've talked you off the, off the topic.

Yeah, we'll keep going with it because by my calculation, you. Yeah, so as you said, you had about two and a half thousand calories over the seven hours because of the rest that was either there or pretty.

Race, something like that.

Yep. Yeah, approximately, I would say about a thousand calories of that would have been Hammer drink. Is that correct?

I didn't take Hammer, but because you.

Had a, you had a food drink or you just had food.

Sorry, I only had food and I had a little bit of, in the scratch labs powder, there's probably 80 calories per serve or something like maybe 120 calories per serve. So there might be 20. I think there's probably 20 grams of carbohydrate in the salt mix. So that that was one way to get some carbohydrate on board without making a really gluggy. I mean, don't get wrong. I think Hammer make great products and I have used them, but for me they don't. I find them difficult to digest and I suffer after the event. Whereas if I'm eating rice balls and dates and bananas and fruitcake afterwards, I'm fine.

Yeah. So I assumed you had the hammer because most of us do. And I'm someone that is the opposite. I respond so well to a drink like that and very poorly to food. That was going to be my question because I thought, how could you have had all that food, those snacks as well as the hammer? I didn't think that makes sense. That. Yeah, it was all, it was all based on the snacks.

Well, that's good.

Um, I guess my follow up question is then how, how do you change nutrition and how do we feel ourselves between higher intensity events and I'm talking higher intensity right down to maybe a half hour hour race and the difference between that and endurance?

Well, I mean we've talked about endurance. So endurance really is about ensuring that you've got enough energy to complete a session. All right, so endurance being I guess, three hours plus. All right, you're at risk of running out of, of energy because you're depending on what you're doing because your stored energy is not sufficient, particularly if you're undertaking dietary modification, which we can talk about like we've talked about in the past, but you know, if you're, if you're trying to train your metabolism with a generally low carbohydrate diet, you're, you're not going to have stored much stored glycogen. So your approach to an endurance training session, it necessarily needs to incorporate consumed energy, probably including glucose. Okay, carbohydrate and then it's the, get your calculator out again. I don't think you can go wrong with a calculator. It's not the only approach, but it works. So you figure out roughly what you're going to use, roughly what you've got stored, and then you work out backwards and then break it into pieces, Break it into pieces just before and during the, during the session. With respect to intensity, as we've discussed before, I believe at higher intensity, at the highest intensity, most of us are exclusively using carbohydrate as fuel. The muscles, muscle is very happy to burn anything as fuel. Anything that crosses its path, it'll burn amino acids, it'll burn fatty acids, it'll burn, it'll burn carbohydrate. But when it's working hard, all at once is glucose. So as long as you have enough glucose, which is either in your circulation from having just been consumed within the last two or three hours, or whether it's in stored glycogen, which can be released very quickly, as long as that's adequate for the session. Again, get, get, get your calculator out at, at full gas, you're going to burn 800 calories an hour. Okay, so if your time trial is 30 minutes, you need 400 calories. You've got that, you've got that. Now do you want a little bit, bit extra just in case? Absolutely. Gel on the start line done, right, you're not going to run out of, you're not going to run out of fuel unless you are on a ketogenic diet, in which case you are going to run out of fuel and possibly it's too late to do anything about it. You possibly couldn't eat enough gels to get them. They just don't last long enough. So that's, that's my approach again. It's a bit formulaic, a bit basic really, but it's. Yeah, the science of what, how we partition fuel, what we use at particular intensity, that's well known, well, well understood. I do believe my asterisk with that. I do believe that very, very well trained athletes can burn fat right up to, right up to threshold, whereas the rest of us mortals, we're at that, at sub threshold, we're burning predominantly, almost exclusively carbohydrate. The threshold, there's no question. But it is a worthwhile endeavor to train when, for periods on a low carbohydrate diet to push that curve so that you're burning fatty acids right up to sub threshold. Because then when, when race day comes, that's what you'll do and you'll conserve glycogen. And I think in, in a sport like Ironman, the person with glycogen at the end of the race does very well relative to the one that runs out. And I know that, I mean, I look after a number of patients that say I was going great until the 30k mark of the run and you're like, that's the diff. That's, that's the difference right there. It's not that long, is it? You know, you're almost home. But if you run out of glycogen, that's a very long 12ks.

Isn't it such a common story as well? I want to stay on the calculator note because do you have a tool or a method to help yourself calculate this accurately? There are online tools and as you mentioned, you could refer to your Garmin, your Strava, your training peaks. You have that 800 calorie kind of.

Rule for full gas.

What is there a really accurate tool you can use personally? Because carbon and training picks are only based off general equations if you've input your height and weight correctly and.

True, true, that I know is my short answer. It's all rule of thumb because in the end, if you get near to it, you can figure out if it works for you. I will say this. I use the calculator Method and I lost so much weight in my training for the warning that clearly I was under egging it. I had to have. I mean I lost probably in the last few weeks, I lost a kilogram a week in weight and I was eating everything in sight.

So.

You did mention over, over fueling. But it is because I can't give an individual answer. It really, it's a framework and then it's trial and error. I wish I could be more scientific, but I just, I haven't found an approach that's precise for everyone. I certainly don't think a calculator exists online that could do it. And if, if it purports to do so, it's probably full of it in my view.

Awesome.

It's probably a. I thought you were going to say something, dad. That's why I paused for a second. Yeah, well, I was going to say on the calculator front, it, like you said, those online ones are probably just different variations of a generic equation. So.

Yeah, look, I just wanted to just briefly touch on something that's really intrigued me over the journey of 40 years of endurance training and racing and nutrition. And we're talking specifically race nutrition here, not everyday eating. The debate between solid fuels in your digestive system in the middle of an event as compared to liquid fluid, that's, that's going to probably get the same calories and the, the idea that there's a compromise going on because blood is being taken away from the working muscles to digest the solid food as compared to drinking the equivalent calories in a fluid drink. Yeah, I really want to hear your, what you think about that. And you, you advocate eating and I don't, I'm definitely not an eater and we both get the good outcome. And that's kind of what I wanted to ask, you know, how is that compromise, the solids versus liquid debate in your eyes. And everybody's different. So there's no one hard, fast rule here.

Yeah, I mean by the time it passes into the small intestine, it's the same because most of the digestion of carbohydrate occurs after the stomach. The stomach really does, the protein part of it. So from an energetics point of view, from a blood diversion point of view, I'm not sure that it is much.

Different.

Is my general thinking on it. I think there is a large group of people that suffer significant gastric distress and gut distress with some of the engineered fuels. But there are a very fortunate group of people that aren't. They can, they can consume large quantities of, of, you know, multidextrose and, and so forth and not suffer any gut inflammation. I mean, I, I, I don't want to. There's no question. If you can tolerate and do well on these fuels, then then it's perfect because it's so convenient, it's in your bidding. Right? But if you are suffering.

If you're.

Suffering either during or after, then the alternative is, is to eat food. So that's, I mean that's the approach I take. I look after some people that use perpetuum religiously and I think that's perfectly fine because at the end of the day we're trying to fuel fuel for exercise and for those that don't, I advocate eating and I, I myself, I, I can't, I simply can't have even one bidden with three scoops of perpetuum. It, it renders me fairly useless for the, the rest of the day when I get home.

I have a question on quality of foods and something we haven't asked you yet and I myself had found a lot of videos and research on is low GI versus high GI foods for both just general nutrition and training. What are your thoughts? Do you have any thoughts on whether we should be splitting these up in nutrition and training?

Oh totally, absolutely. So I mean, guess we should start with sort of definitions because there's a lot of misconception about low GI and high GI and what, what on earth that means. But it's, it might be interesting to you to know that glycemic index is a, is a some concept that was invented, I don't know, 20 years ago or 30 years ago that would assess the amount of sugar released into the blood over a two hour period after consuming a food relative to white bread.

Right.

So white bread is like you know, equals 100. So the glycemic of white bread is the, is the standard and then things are measured either. So 50 grams of white bread is measured relative to 50 grams of apples, relative to 50 grams of a Mars bar, et cetera.

White bread, meaning it, when you eat it, it just goes, the glucose goes straight.

Well, white bread goes through as it goes through. Right? And it's just the reference point. Okay, so if you drank, if you ate jelly beans, okay, 50 grams of jelly beans has a higher glycemic index than white bread, but 50 grams of, I don't know, milk has a lower glycemic index. But so I find again it's the amount of carbohydrates released into the body in A two hour window for training. Clearly you want high gi. A banana is high gi, a piece of fruitcake is high gi. You don't want it sitting in your gut and or not releasing the carbohydrate into the bloodstream because the quicker and more effectively you get the carbohydrate into the blood, the better your chance your muscle has of using it. That's the first thing. But in terms of not training, then I don't find glycemic index to be particularly relevant. I'm more interested in, I guess, insulin, which is the hormone released in response to the appearance of nutrient in the blood. As a medical professional, I've come to understand that chronically high levels of insulin mean only bad things from a general health point of view, metabolic health point of view. So I'm interested in foods that don't trigger insulin as much, no matter what their glycemic index are. So for instance, well, cheese doesn't have a glycemic index because it's, it's not carbohydrate. Steak doesn't have a glycemic index because it's not carbohydrate. And yet these things can do trigger insulin in some way or another. But in general, things like nuts and protein and fat don't trigger the same insulin response. There's other evidence to suggest that high GI foods, so foods that release a lot of sugar into the blood are associated with food addiction and cravings. So the, the other important factor is how satiated you are after a particular food. And I may have given you the story before, but have you ever thought about, you probably wouldn't because you guys are super healthy, but I reckon I've eaten a medium sized pizza and still being able to eat dessert, right? No, I don't do this anymore.

Definitely have. Yeah, right.

Okay, but could you, what's a, what's a medium pizza weigh? A kilogram, let's say.

Right.

It's pretty heavy. Could you eat a kilogram of steak? Could you eat a kilogram of cheese? Could you eat a kilogram of nuts? No. Why? Because your brain goes, that is enough. I'm satiated, I'm full, I don't want any more. And carbohydrate. And particularly high GI foods, they don't stop you eating. So again, one of the key lessons that I give to the people I look after is if you don't address hunger, you will fail because hunger is powerful. It'll kick you while you're down. Right? You're trying to lose Weight. If you let yourself get hungry, you're in trouble. Okay? You will not succeed if you let yourself get hungry. So how do you stop yourself getting hungry? You have to address it. You can't ignore it. So you have to eat food that satiates you. And the answer to this is almost always to have something that's high in oil or fat and hang on for 10, you know, have a handful of almonds or cashews and hang on. Or have a protein shake with some MCT oil in it and hang on for 10 minutes and watch. Watch how the feeling of hunger disappears. And then, then the only reason you'd eat is, you know, other reasons, stress, habit, et cetera. But at least if you're mindful, oh well, the hunger's gone. Now I, now I just want to eat corn chips because I like eating corn chips or I'm stressed, you know, I'm fidgety, I want to do something. But again, once you remove hunger, you know, you're a good way of the way there to liberating yourself.

I've actually used that trick with peanut butter at night if I was still hungry after dinner. I've just had a spoonful or two of peanut butter and I noticed that goes straight away. So does low GI equal a less insulin response or is. Are there low dry foods that still. Good question.

Not. So they're generally correlated. Okay, but not always. Yeah, not always, but yeah. I mean by and large you can make the assumption that if a food is, is low gi, then it will also have a blunt insulin response.

And I'm not sure if this is relevant. But then does fiber come into it? Because are you aiming for high gi, low fiber foods? Sorry. So low fiber is easy to digest, is that correct or is it, am I getting that wrong?

Well, that's right. No, exactly. So fiber doesn't really come into the equation.

Yeah, yeah. But if you, you know, I think the clear example in my head is white bread versus wholemeal bread. White bread is low fiber. Wholemeal, high fiber. But for events, you know, racing, you'd want low fiber. Cause you don't want the body to be. You choose white bread over whole meal bread in this example because you kind of want.

Oh, definitely high gi, definitely one. But that's, that's probably more digestive again. Yeah, you'll get, you're going to work harder to try to digest that food, I think.

And do you have any thoughts of. Yeah, I guess. Any more specifically in your day to day meals? It's on the on the low gi, high gi, low fiber, high fiber thing, or it's, it's coming down to a.

Hunger and I, I put it more, I mean, I think you're on the right track. You're trying to reduce the number of spikes of insulin. So if you, if you typically stay to less carbohydrate, you'll do that. And if you're gonna eat carbohydrate, then again, if you have something that is a low gi, by definition, it's releasing less carbohydrate into the bloodstream and therefore will have a reduced insulin response, which is good.

With all these things in mind, I kind of want to finish off on this topic of balance. And I want to start by asking, how are you helping your patients get this balance right? We have spoken about this before in the other podcast, but it's always worth revisiting. Get the balance right between being on a diet and training on a diet, but also having a balanced daily nutrition, meal plan diet. So.

That'S a complex and it's a really good question and I'm just trying to figure out the best way to approach it. I think at the sort of high level it's important, it's important that the individual understands their priorities, understands that dietary modification doesn't necessarily equate to improved performance straight away. It's a good thing for this person if they have a coach, for the coach to be on board and supportive and the person to have expectations that match what, what they're doing. And I gave the classic example. If you, if you lower the amount of carbohydrate you're eating, you should understand that your time trial performance or longer, longer effort performance is not going to be what it will be later after adaptation. In terms of the sort of the balance between health and performance, there is a balance, I reckon, because we know that, we know already that things like it like fasting and a ketogenic diet and low intensity exercise, you know, sort of zone two is better for us for, for living longer and living healthier than the extremes. You know, if you're chronically smashing, I mean, I, I wouldn't want to look at the insulin resistance levels of, of young NRS riders, but I, I suspect, you know, with the amount of carbohydrate they're consuming, it could be, it could be very interesting. But, you know, it's a balance. And I think, you know, certainly the, the program that we are on or variants like it include quite a good amount of zone 2 ish training. So somewhere between Able to talk, you know, while doing it, and, and high, high tempo is very good for our metabolism, not necessarily any good for your sprint. So I, I don't know if that answers the question, but that's my approach is really it, it is you, you are trying to balance these things. What's good for you in the long run, what's good for your performance, what's good for you right now? They don't always, they don't always align. Um, I don't know if I've answered your question properly.

Am I right in thinking that your view is the way we probably train as, as motivated age group athletes that want the best out of ourselves isn't the actually the best for us long term? And putting ourselves on these certain diets isn't possibly the best. But you're saying when you take it back just a notch, that is the most beneficial?

Well, I don't know because health is a spectrum of things, right? Includes how you feel, your attitude and your mental health when you're setting personal bests, winning races, that sort of thing. That has a very positive effect. So there is definitely an argument to continue to compete and be extreme from a physiological point of view and that will give you benefit. But if I took an average person off the street, I would just say the more time you can do in zone two, the better your health will be.

I'm glad that's your answer because as I was giving you that summary I thought this isn't right because this makes me think that maybe I'm pushing too hard. But you're so correct in that there's so much more to it than this one dimensional view. So my comment was really quite one dimensional, I think in an incorrect way. So I'm quite happy with your answer.

Yeah, that's certainly the approach I take. I'm like the rest of us. I want to race hard, I want to push my pedals hard, I want to do well, I want to see my heart rate at new numbers, power at new numbers, et cetera. But again, that's not necessarily the advice I give to an average person that is trying to be more healthy or generally fitter. You know, I think you can achieve that with some pretty simple training intervention.

I guess every athlete's aware that an Ironman is a completely abnormal event and so is the Melbourne Tewani. But they're not, they're not the norm and then they're one off kind of events that you do well.

You know, any racing actually, you know, is not, you know, we're In a bubble, you probably forget this. And you're. You're deep in the bubble. I'm in the bubble, but I get to see outside the bubble. You never get to look outside. I'm telling you, most people don't do anything. Right. If you're exercising, you're in the. You're abnormal already.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, try and get people to exercise five times, 30 minutes a day. Good luck with that. You know, this is. This is why drug companies, you know, are doing as well as they do. It's because most people can't exercise and. And do a little bit of fasting and a little bit of food restriction. Right. You just do those three things. A little bit of fasting, a little bit of caloric restriction and some exercise. And virtually 90% of the chronic diseases known to us disappear. But that doesn't occur because most people don't do anything. I'm not judging. I'm just saying. That's my observation is it's really hard to get people to do something.

Dad, as we're wrapping up this podcast, did you have any topic or question that could potentially make us go another 20 minutes? But do you have anything that you wanted to touch on for Harry?

No. I really love the way the conversation's gone in this podcast, and we could talk for hours, as you and I have been known to do. Harry, a lot. And we love discussing all topics, and it's really good that everybody out there listening can hear that not one thing works the same for everybody. And that's, you know, everybody's got differences, and that's no different to your training. Your program might work for you, Jordan, and it might not be good for you, Harry, and same with your nutrition. And you need to be practicing your nutrition as much as you practice your training. And that will be the thing that will make it work best for you. Knowing and understanding how your body responds to different inputs of variations of solid fuel, liquid fuel. And there is no right and wrong in this.

I want to add, Jerry, and I don't know how much you appreciate.

What.

Your program is doing as well. I want to emphasize that when you set someone a program, you are training their metabolism just as much as you're training their neuromuscular development. It's when you give someone a program, those sessions have a very strong effect on the metabolism of that individual. So it makes perfect sense to tie that in with nutrition both off and on the bike or run or swim. They are inseparable. And the more quickly people realize that you can't do one without the other, the better off they are. And certainly we've seen the successes of some of the people who've finally gone, okay, I need to sort it all out. I can't just be eating whatever shit I want often on the bike. But train properly. You know, it doesn't. It doesn't work that way because you're not just training your leg strength or your, you know, your heart and your lungs. You are definitely training your liver, your fat stores, your pancreas. It's all been trained.

Yep. Yep.

It's so true, isn't it? And. And that's one of the things that is important for everybody to understand that the whole package is the best outcome. And I know that a lot of the people who've gone through your program have really understood when you starve the body of certain percentages of carbohydrate, fats, and any type of fuel, the actual ability to fulfill the training session is just decreasing dramatically minute by minute as you go through the session. And that's an alarming realization that people come to. Oh, far out. What's wrong with me? Well, it's actually nothing wrong with you. It's just that the body is learning to adapt to the limitations you're putting on it. And that's something that people think a lot of the time. I perform poorly today, but it actually could have been that you perform nutritionally poorly. You're actually physically in great shape, but your nutrition performance was substandard.

Mm.

Exactly.

As always, I have a list of topics, and this conversation has been so valuable that we've gotten to half of them, so we will inevitably have to get you on again. But is there anything, Harry, that you wanted to talk about to finish off or touch on or tell any of the listeners in today's episode that we didn't get to.

Look, we touched on it. These are strange times. And, you know, Terry said, be kind to yourself. That's. That's. That's what I'd like to reiterate. This is a good time to take stock, Be grateful for what we have. Don't expect you to. Don't. Don't expect to feel normal in an abnormal time like this. You know, I don't. I don't know, but I don't think it feels too different to what wartime would feel like, you know, from. From the. You know, this sort of sense of claustrophobia, particularly in Australia, where we're used to traveling freely and as we want, uncertainty with. With our work and with our businesses, you know, chronically missing out on things that we, that we've taken for granted. Going to the football, racing, a bike race, catching up with friends. It is a really shitty time and I just think I wanted to just reiterate what Gerry said which is about self kindness and that's all I have for you today, Jordan.

Well, thank you very much. That is a great way to finish. As always, we appreciate you coming on. I'm sure we'll get some questions and if you want to work with Harry the my performance doctor you definitely can. He has a range of programs that you can do with regards to weight loss, nutrition for racing, ketogenic diets, the work. So Harry, where can they find you and what's how's the best way to get in contact with you?

So the, the best way is to contact me through my website which is MyPerformance Doctor or one word.com or reach out to one of you guys and happy for you to forward on my number and just send me a, send me a message and normally pretty good with responding otherwise otherwise you can send me an email at Dr.harry or one word Dr. Harryperformancedoctor.com Perfect.

Once again thank you very much for coming on. That is it for this epic episode and we'll see you next time.

Sam.