#199 - Running, overcoming challenges, and finding success | Ryan Hall

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe Now without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Ryan Hall. Ryan is a retired American long distance runner who holds the US record in the half marathon at 4:59:43, where he became the first US runner to break the one hour barrier. He also holds the American record in the marathon and is the only American to run sub 205. Running 2 hours, 4 minutes and 58 seconds, Ryan is generally regarded as one of the greatest American distance runners. He retired in 2016 after a really difficult four year period following the London Olympics which was plagued by lots of injuries and he's really transformed his body in a way that is almost difficult to imagine without looking at a picture of him then versus now. Ryan now is a coach. He coaches his wife who is also a professional runner, and he coaches runners of all categories and talent levels through his training program called Run Free Training. He's written a book called Run the Mile you're in, which we talk about a little bit in this podcast, but probably not as much as I would have liked to. We spend so much time talking about things here that this is one of the few podcasts where I really felt like I came into it with kind of a sense of where I wanted to go and I completely came off that. I never really come into podcasts with a list of questions, but I usually have a sense of direction and here I deviated from it completely and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it just speaks to how much I couldn't stop wanting to get into details of his training and and how just intrigued I have been by his transformation. When you look at Ryan today, he's an enormous physical specimen, probably over £190, powerlifting going on, carrying all these extreme feats of physical strength, some of which we talk about, but many of which you can See on his Instagram account and I can't recommend that highly enough. It's just amazing to watch. For example, his last one was doing a 500 pound deadlift and then immediately running into a five minute mile. He didn't succeed in that. I think he went 5:22 or something. But he's going to take another shot at it. We also talk about what I think is the most crazy of all of his fitness challenges that he does for himself. But I won't spoil that here. I wanted to talk with Ryan basically because he's one of the few people who has achieved remarkable success across two seemingly opposite disciplines, which is extreme distance running, extreme aerobic fitness, and then obviously extreme strength training. And we talk a lot about the toll that the former took on his body. In fact, I KN before this interview that Ryan had suffered from really low testosterone during his running days. I didn't realize how low it was. He actually revealed during this interview that it was in the 1002, meaning it was below 200 nanograms per deciliter. That would be below or in the first percentile. That is so incredibly low. It's amazing to me that he could function period. Today he says his Testosterone is about 1,000 nanograms per deciliter, which places him at about the 90th percentile. Obviously a testament to how he's changed his nutrition and, and the fact that he's not running 110 miles. A week. In this episode we talk about his career, but not necessarily in the most linear way. His amazing successes and his epic failures and what he's learned through these experiences. And I think this is just kind of an amazing interview, even if you're not a runner. But I think it really talks a lot about the mindset of what it means to be successful. And you'll get the sense when you listen to this that Ryan is just an incredibly optimistic person. He's the kind of person who really never seems to let failure get to him in a way that maybe some of us certainly myself would. And I think his optimism is kind of what's allowed him to bounce back from so many setbacks. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ryan Hall. Hey Ryan. Looking very forward to having this discussion with you today. I've been a fan of yours for a long time actually, and running is kind of like, I don't know, it's sort of like F1. It's not really that popular in the United States, although it's becoming more so. I mean, obviously Netflix's Drive to Survive series has made F1 very popular. And I think also people are starting to become a little bit more aware of runners after. Well, I don't really know what it is, but I think Kipchoge's two hour sub effort kind of got a lot of people in this country excited about it. But I think for me, the interest in running started because I used to swim with Alan Webb. So back in the early 2000s when he was this phenom who sets the high school record for the mile. And I'm swimming next to this guy in the next lane and just became kind of interested in his journey and then obviously learned about you and the other runners of that generation. So anyway, your transformation has been remarkable. And I almost don't know where to begin. But let's just start with. Because some people won't know a lot about you, but. So you grew up in Big Bear, right?

Yeah, correct. Southern California.

Yeah, but it's at altitude, so it's not like beach, Southern California. People think SoCal, they think orange county or San Diego, right?

Yeah. I mean, Big Bear is a really cool place to grow up. I mean, we're like two hours from the beach, so it's one of the few places you can like both surf and snowboard or ski in the same day. Yeah, we grew up with snow. I live like a mile away from Snow Summit. And it was just honestly is like the perfect place to grow up as a distance runner. Like, when you look at the best guys in the world, they're oftentimes coming from Ethiopia and Kenya, places that are at 7,000ft altitude. And that's exactly what I was at. And so kind of just found myself in like the perfect scenario for a distance runner. And even in the sense of being able to live high and train low. So when I was growing up in high school, my dad was my coach, Started a cross country and track team just so I could run. There wasn't even one available at Big Bear High School. We would drop down like twice a week, drive an hour down to sea level, get on a track at sea level, run some super hard interval sessions, and then pop back up to altitude. So we're kind of before our time in a lot of ways, you know, like the research and studies are showing how beneficial that kind of training is. But we were just doing it because it just made sense. It was the environment in which I found myself. And pretty crazy to look back on it now and see how things like that really do kind of contribute to the trajectory of the path that you're on.

And I suspect there's something to being in that environment when you're young, during the formative years of your cardiovascular system. I look at like my daughter who's 13 and she loves volleyball and basketball, but doesn't like cross country or track. And I'm trying not to be a psycho about it, but I'm also sort of telling her, like, you have this really narrow window in which your cardiovascular system is quite malleable. And I'm very fortunate that because I was involved in boxing, I had to do so much cardio, both aerobic and anaerobic training during those formative years. And even though I'm a fraction of that level of fitness today, I can still ride on what I had then. But I feel like if you don't push that system hard in your teenage years, it's very hard to develop it later. I don't know if that's true, but that has been my impression. And then to take that one step further, which is what someone like you has been able to do, to have that altitude arbitrage is I think, just unbelievable.

Oh yeah. I mean, the effects of cardio at a young age definitely play on later in life. Like now, for example, Like, I really don't do much cardio at all. Like last year I had nine months where I just focused on strength training, just trying to get as big and strong as I can. My weight went up from 167 to 192 over nine months and I was literally doing zero running. None. Like no other cardio, no biking, no swimming, nothing. I hopped on a treadmill at the end of that period when I was at my heaviest just to see like, let me see where my miles at. Cause I was going to train for this challenge. I tried this 500 pound deadlift into a sub 5 minute mile. So I was like, let me see where I'm at. Just starting wise hopped on a treadmill after my weight session. 5:18 for the mile with 00 training. And I think that goes to kind of like what you're talking about, like when you develop that early on and like you just need little touches here and there. I take pretty short rest between a lot of my lifts and that's like enough to keep me in 5, 18 mile shape without even trying, you know. But yeah, I mean there's a ton of interesting things like they talk about kids who are born at altitude and how they have greater potential for cardio development over time, but it's kind of Interesting. Like looking at my family, I'm in the middle of five kids. My youngest brother, Chad, he's super into endurance stuff, and he was born at altitude. Where I was born in Seattle, Washington.

How old were you when you got to Big bear?

I was 5 years old, so pretty young. So I spent most of my time at altitude, but he was born in altitude. But we didn't really see a whole drastic effect. I mean, he was a really good runner. He won the national championships in high school cross country. So a stud runner. Went, went to Oregon on scholarship and all that stuff. But between him and I, there's not like a huge difference in what we've seen in terms of our top end potential for cardio.

The other thing that you alluded to that I wanted to talk about later, but we might as well just talk about it now because you brought it up. And I think it's an important thing that I became pretty interested in many years later when I was swimming and trying to look for ways to improve was basically the matrix of living high, living low, training high, training low, and coming up with what was the optimal scenario. And it turned out, as you pointed out, this is something for which we have a very clear answer today. The answer wasn't clear 20 years ago. Today the answer is crystal clear. Which is the best results are attained from living high, training low when it comes to intensity. So you can live high, train high for low end aerobic efficiency, but you have to train that anaerobic peak at sea level. And so I remember swimming up in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training center when I would go up there for some swim camps and stuff. And being a guy who lived at sea level, who would then go to try to push it hard in Colorado, I mean, it was a total waste of time. I mean, it was a complete waste of time to try to do any top end anaerobic stuff when I hadn't had any ability to do that. In fact, it was the exact opposite you'd want to do. And so I had friends who lived at sea level, but they would have oxygen deprivation tents that they would sleep in at sea level to functionally replicate the living high, so then they could train at sea level. What you described growing up is really the kind of perfect way to be able to do that. You made it sound like that was just sort of accidentally discovered though. You guys just sort of empirically stumbled upon the efficacy of that training.

Yeah, it was just kind of like it just felt good. Anytime I'd hop down to sea level to do track workout. It's kind of like you're saying, Peter, it's like I try that stuff it out altitude and like running 400 meter repeats on short rests or like longer aerobic efforts where you're trying to do like mile reps super fast, you just, you got to do it, you have to structure it different at altitude. Whereas you go down to sea level and you can spend a lot of time at race pace, you know, working on that turnover, which you just can't do it altitude without breaking it up more. And so that's what we do a lot of when we're up high, stand up high for intervals is we'll just break things up where you're doing a bunch of two hundreds on really short rest. But yeah, we just enjoyed popping down to sea level for those sessions. Just felt good. And it was working. The results were very obvious. But yeah, the whole altitude thing is really interesting because my wife Sarah, who's a professional marathon runner, she's run 220 for the marathon, which is the second fastest ever by an American. It took her. She grew up at sea level in Santa Rosa, California. So when you're talking, Peter, about going up to Colorado and doing the swimming stuff, there's also this effect of like, how many years have you spent in altitude? So like, for example, I am super good at altitude in terms of running, you know, like, I can run pretty close to my sea level times at 7,000ft altitude.

At what distance? At any distance.

So particular I'm thinking about like marathon training. So like what's most important marathon training is your thresholds. So 15 mile thresholds. We just run 15 miles at that kind of marathon intensity. And I could run 12, 15 miles at 4:48 per mile, which is about marathon pace at 7,000ft. And if I pop down to sea level, maybe I'm running like 442 pace, 440 pace. But I didn't get a huge conversion from altitude to sea level. Whereas someone like my wife Sarah, who wasn't as accustomed to altitude, she'll get sometimes like 20 seconds a mile where she's running that much slower at altitude, that much faster at sea level. But she's also gotten better the more time she spent at altitude. So she first we moved to Mammoth Lakes out of college after we graduated from Stanford in 2005. And she was hating living in Mammoth at 8,000ft for such a long time. But gradually over time, like she's gotten much, much better at altitude. Probably still not as good as like, I was when I was in my prime. But now we have to even go up to higher altitudes to get similar effects to what we were getting before. So we have a place in Crested Butte, Colorado, where we're sleeping at 9,400ft. And every time she goes up there, we see a massive jump in her fitness just from doing like a month stand up there. So you have to keep playing with it because you realize the science is there and your experiences are true, but also your body's dynamic. It's always changing, right? So you got to, like, you just can't repeat the same thing over and over and over again. Like, you have to realize my whole body is always changing, always adapting, so I gotta be throwing new things at it. And that's like a big thing that I've learned in the lifting space as well. It's like if I'm just doing the same lifting all the time and not trying new mechanisms to add weight to the bar, different tactics, like, I'm just not going to see growth, right? So it's just. That's the fun thing about running, training, lifting. It's all just an experiment of one. It's just all just a giant experiment, right? And you're just always like, tweaking little variables. And that's what I love about fitness, running, all of that stuff is I love seeing growth. I love just like the frustration of not seeing growth, getting plateaus and be like, what is going on right now? And like, my mind's just like chewing on this over and over again for, like, months and months. And then I'm just making little tweaks, little tweaks till I find it. Then you find it and bang, it clicks, you know? And whether it's in the weight room or running, all of a sudden you're doing what you couldn't do before, and you're like, ah, I just love. I love learning and growing in that way, you know?

Well, you really touched on a lot of things there, but one of them is this concept of progressive overload. And I think that that is one of the hardest things to really do when you're training yourself, as most of us are, right? Most of us, we're just kind of weekend warriors, and we're. We're sort of our own coaches. And it is very easy to get kind of comfortable. And again, it's true in the weight room, it's true on the bike, it's true if you're running or whatever it is you're doing. But therein lies the challenge of being able to progressively overload, which doesn't always mean weight. It can mean sets, it can mean reps, it can mean reduction in rest time. There's so many ways that one can progressively overload. Lately I've become pretty obsessed with blood flow restriction and weight training. So that becomes another way to progressively overload, using a fraction of the weight that you would normally use.

Yeah, I've been doing some of that too. I love that, especially for runners, because runners like I got hurt. I was training for the Beijing Olympics. I was at the Olympic training Center in Chula Vista working with a strength coach. He had me on one of those vibrating platforms to warm up for squatting and it worked great. I was able to warm up and get into a much deeper squat than I never got into before. But as a runner, most runners are super tight and the ankle mobility isn't there. Like, shouldn't be down in a butt to the ground squat. It's just not beneficial for distance runners. It's not specific for distance runners. So anyways, long story short, I ended up tweaking. Like the connection to my patella. And that bothered me all the way up to Beijing. In Beijing, I was kicking myself so much for getting hurt lifting, you know.

Now you had a pretty good run in Beijing, though. I mean, you finished 10th, if I recall.

Yeah, yeah, I was 10th there. But to me, like, it wasn't about what place I finished. It was the sensation of clicking.

Yeah, you didn't click. You went out a little slow in that race, if I recall. You. Yeah, you were very tentative, like the first 15k and then you actually kind of came back. You basically. I don't know if you negative split by time, but it seemed by effort. You certainly did.

Yeah, I mean, I wrote a book about like that whole experience, you know, like so much went into that, but I also wasn't clicking in training. You know how you can tell when like in training it's like, oh, I just feel like before I ran the Houston half, I went for a run in Big Bear a couple days before that race and it was snowing like crazy. Like those big old snowflakes are come down super slow and it is just stacking up. I was literally running like a foot of snow on the roads that hadn't even been plowed yet. And I felt like Tigger. Like, I just felt like I was just bouncing along as effortless. Like when things are clicking and training, then it's like, who this is going to be fun? You know, you're kind of licking your chops kind of feel going into Beijing. I didn't take a big break after running 206 at the London Marathon in April. I didn't take my customary 2 week break where I put on 10 pounds and don't run at all. I didn't do that. And so then I was just kind of flat, like the whole build up for Beijing. So I wasn't, I wasn't right going into the race. But then there's also this thing of you're talking to the scientists and we're doing like all this stuff at the Olympic Training center where they're prepping us for the race, talking about how hot and humid it's going to be. And it was one of those big life learning experiences for me, where the storyline is it's gonna be so hot and humid, it's gonna be slow, it's gonna be one in like 2:12 to 11, right? And so we're just buying this story and we're hearing the story over and over again. And I didn't do what I learned to do after that, which is like, you gotta be like the samurai. It's like you gotta be ready for any situation that's gonna come, you know, and not expect anything. So like the saying is like, expect nothing, be ready for anything. And I wasn't in that state of mind. I was like, all right, it's going to be chill the first mile and. And right from the gun, Sammy's just like gone. The guy who ended up winning the gold medal just took it out super hard, right? And it was like, mentally I got hit in the chin with an uppercut, like right out of the gate, you know, because I wasn't. I wasn't ready for that scenario at all. So then you get back and you're in like 60th place and you're trying to win a medal and you're like, you don't win a medal from 60th place. I mean, you can, but you have to really like, coach yourself through some tough spots because you don't have momentum on your side. And a lot of competing well in anything is getting excited while you're out there, right? Like, you gotta be just building this snowball of excitement as the race is playing out. And I was having the opposite experience of that where I was like, I'm not where I want to be. I'm too far back, can't even see the leaders, the helicopters, like way off in the distance, you know. And so I had to kind of coach myself through that. And actually how I did. Did that was by encouraging other guys around me, which isn't a normal tactic that you do. But as I encouraged other people, it encouraged me that, like, I was, like, able to hold a conversation with people, and I just felt better from just, like, trying to actually help other people out. And it shifted what was happening inside my mind, inside my heart. Now I was able to kind of find my own rhythm and start to work my way up in that race and finish 10th, which I wasn't stoked on at the time, like, I was trying to get a medal. But it's funny, the further removed you get from these things, and the older you get, you. You appreciate it more, you know? And so I look back on it now, proud of the performance was Meb also.

I mean, Meb got a silver, if I recall, in Athens in 04, right?

Yeah. And then he.

Was he there in 08.

He wasn't, no. So we were training together up in Mammoth Lakes, and he was dealing with a lot of injury issues going into it, so he. I think he DNF'd at the trials that year. In 2007, he had some gnarly kind of hip stuff going on, and that was actually really cool to see MEB in that situation where he went through so many injuries, so many down times, and like, even, like, mentally struggling with how to handle that and see him pop out the other end of that. Win New York, win Boston was just incredible. So he's. We were neighbors in Mammoth when we were training. We live like 400 meters apart, and he's always been kind of like a big brother to me, so. Such a good dude. And, yeah, I was, you know, in that race when he won Boston, and that was such a special experience. I remember I was. I was having a bad day.

It was a horrible day for you, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was running terrible. Yeah. But I just remember coming up over Heartbreak Hill, and, you know, we don't know what's happening out there. I knew MEB was away, and I knew that, like, our group was pretty far back, and I knew he had a chance of winning it, but you don't know what's happening. So I. I was coming up over Heartbreak Hill, and I remember just yelling at the spectators on the side. I was like, how is MEB doing when he came past here? And they're like, he was winning when he came past, and I knew if he got over Heartbreak, Heartbreak Hill in the lead, he was going to win that thing. So, yeah, that was special.

It is hard to believe that that was 2014, because that's just one of those races that is seared in my mind. I remember it so well because I used to. I don't want to say I trained with meb, but we trained at the same place in San Diego. So there's this place called Fiesta Island. It's perfectly flat. So that's where all the time trial races are. So three or four days a week, I would do my training on Fiesta island. And it's 7km and it's perfectly flat. And Meb would do his tempo runs there. And early on a Tuesday or Thursday morning, we'd be the only two guys out there. Me on my bike, him running. And I think it's actually worth pointing out to people listening to this who aren't familiar with some of these times just how fast you guys run. So you threw around some numbers earlier, like marathon pace, 4:42 to 4:48. I mean, these are such insanely fast speeds that I think the likelihood that a person could run that speed for half a mile is virtually zero. Right. Like, I know right now, I could not go out and run 800 meters half a mile at that pace. There's simply no way.

Yeah. Which is funny because I can't either.

I know, but it's just. It's so fast. And I used to have a sign in my office that said 4:42. So it was a pace clock, and it said 4:42. And it actually came from. I remember getting this idea off something one of your sponsors did for one of your races many, many years ago. They had a treadmill set up to that pace. And the idea was they just had random people show up, and they're like, how long can you hold the pace that he holds? For a little over two hours. And so they'd put a harness around a person's waist and they'd make them run at 4:42. And these people were getting shot off the back of this treadmill after 30 seconds. 40 seconds. One person made it a minute. Right. And the reason I had that sign up in my office was I was very circumspect, slash put off by the notion that people would say, hey, man, we're training for a marathon, not a sprint. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And I tried to make the point to people that, okay, but if you want to win a marathon, it feels like sprinting. So let's be clear. It's one thing to go out and run a marathon and take six hours to do it. It's another thing to go out and win a marathon. So if you're trying to win a marathon, you have to understand the pain that these guys are in. You have to understand what 4:42 means. It is insanity. And yes, for you it is below your threshold, but your threshold is so high. So looking at meb win that race and having seen him in the months leading up to that, and I'm on my bike and I'm seeing how fast he's running, doing his tempo repeats and stuff, it is really amazing. And I do think it's one of those things where I wish everybody could try to run at that pace and do the exercise that was done on that treadmill or something like that. Because otherwise I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today is very hard to understand from a physiological standpoint.

Yeah, I mean if people just go out to the track and just try and run 200 meters at. Yeah, like my, my half marathon pace is 433 per mile. Right. So that's 34 seconds per 200. So if you just go out to the track and try and run a 34, it's pretty crazy because guys when they're racing, they make it look so effortless. Like Kipchoge when he's running sub to like it looks so slow. So. And it's 34 seconds per 200 is what he's running. And that is very fast. Like 200. But yeah, I mean what you're talking about Peter, is super important. Like distance runners are not slow world class marathoners. I want the guy now I'm coaching, you know, I want the guy who can run 49 seconds for a 400. That's the kind of speed you have to have. Now you don't have to have that speed while you're doing marathon training, but you need to have had that speed before that like as a kid growing up. That's why like with kids I'm like, get as fast as you can. Because if you want to be a world class marathoner, I need 49 seconds speed. Right. Like that's the kind of speed that Kipchoge has. And then that carries you on to be able to run a great mile, to be able to run a great 5k. Like it's all built off speed. Like that's what we work on with training. It's like, let me develop your 5k speed, your mile speed first, which is directly correlated to your sprint speed. Let me develop all that and then we'll grow that into 10k speed, then we'll grow that into half marathon speed, and we'll grow that into marathon speed. But marathoners are, they have wheels and we would have to train in training. I'm doing 50 meter sprints twice a week in the middle of marathon training. 50 meter sprints, like little hill sprints. We're in the weight room. It's a power to weight ratio, like so you got to have power. And that's, that's an area I've grown a ton in since I've retired from running. And as I look back at my. The weights I was doing, I just kind of like scratch my head. I'm like, I wish I could go back and do things a little bit differently in the weight room because I don't think I was using my time effectively there. But yeah, that's. Power is so important for distance runners of all. I mean, unless maybe if you're doing like super ultra stuff, maybe it's not quite as important. But for marathoners, you got to have that speed.

I think it matters everywhere, and I think I know that. Meb was doing deadlifts as he was preparing for 2014. I talked to a guy who had overseen part of his strength training program, and one of the things he was really fixated on was his strength to weight ratio as measured by a deadlift.

Yep. Hex bar deadlift, right?

That's right. Hex bar deadlift with a high concentric and a dropped eccentric. So you pick it up, drop it, pick it up, drop it. Right. So the reason for that being the eccentric tears the muscle fibers. As you're tearing the muscle fibers, that's what's creating hypertrophy. We didn't want any hypertrophy. We just wanted the strength. So it was pick it up, drop it, pick it up, drop it. When MEB first started, if I recall, his strength to body weight ratio for a single rep max was 1.3. So pretty pathetic, right? If we could be honest. Right. He could only deadlift 1.3 times his body weight. I believe going into Boston, he was able to get to 3 to 1. Maybe it was 2.7, but it was in that vicinity. And the logic for this was really just physics. When you run, you have to hit the ground with a toe. You know, whether you're. Let's assume you're toe striking, not heel striking, but your foot has to hit the ground. The harder you hit the ground, the harder the ground hits you. The harder the ground hits you. The higher you go. The higher you go, the further your stride and so they basically had calculated that for Meb to run the pace he wanted to run in Boston that year, he needed to add 4 inches to his stride. And to do that basically required taking his maximal force per unit body weight from something like 1.3 to 2.7. That was going to translate to 4 more inches of stride. So he didn't increase his stride rate, he just increased stride length. And that was done through strength. And I suspect that that's becoming more understood in running now. Right. Because there was a day when I suspect runners were told, don't lift weights. Right. You want to be as skinny as possible. It's not about that type of strength. And I'm guessing that that's not at all how you coach your runners.

No. Yeah. We're super into strength training. And kind of like you're saying, like, my understanding even has changed so much. The years where, like, I used to always think of. Think about your foot action hitting the ground. I always thought it was being like a tiger paw and you're, like, pulling the ground when really that's not what you're going for. You're going for, like, you're saying you're stomping the ground, you're putting force into the ground that's going to shoot you up and out. Right. And I never thought about that way. I was always just trying to, like, paw the ground. And so that's where you want to use your glutes, too. Right. Your glutes are your strongest, biggest muscle. And yet, like so many runners, myself included, as a pro runner, I had very underdeveloped glutes. I would have been way faster, way better if my glute strength was. Was better.

Yeah. And your hamstrings were probably quite weak and probably incredibly tight.

Right. Yeah.

Those insights came from sprinters. Right. So if I. I believe Usain Bolt has the greatest force per unit mass ever measured on a force plate treadmill. So these. You've probably seen these. These treadmills where you run on the treadmill, and it tells you how much force you're putting into the ground. And I believe Usain Bolt is able to put six times his body weight into the ground with each strike, with each foot strike. I mean, it's just. It's crazy to think how strong that is.

Yeah, yeah. It's unreal, but, yeah, I think for people who are listening, if you're a runner, like, try that next time you go out. Try, like, pushing through the ground rather than trying to paw the ground. How you contact the Ground so important. So a lot of people are rolling through the ground. It's very difficult to utilize those glutes and to really put force into the ground when you're rolling from your heel to your toe. Right. So you gotta like contact the ground like mid foot and just be like stomping the ground. But yeah, the weight training helps tremendously with that. So, so, so important for sprinters. For. Yeah. And the hex bar deadlift, that's my favorite lift. I was advising runners or when I am coaching runners, that's the first lift that they do on the day. It's the most important one and the one that we're always trying to increase the amount of load they're able to handle with that.

Have you used this device called a G flight? So it's these two little red boxes that shine a laser beam between them and they measure how high you can jump and your ground contact time.

Hmm, no, no, that sounds interesting though.

So it's super interesting. So it's become a part of my training now. So the way it works is it's shining a little laser across the floor. So you lay these things down on the floor and if you stand between them static, and you jump and come down, it will tell you with incredible precision how high you've jumped. Because it's, it measures how long you're off the ground and it's a simple physics formula to figure out how high you went. So that's really interesting. So one, you can use it for static vertical jump, but I think where you would find it more interesting for your runners is when you do depth jumps. So now you put it in front of a box and you have the athlete jump off the box, hit the ground and jump up. Now it gives you two pieces of information. It tells you how long you were in contact with the ground and how high you went. And the marker of a great runner or a person who is very good at generating force is you should have a higher vertical jump when you jump off a box and land and go up than just static. Most people don't. Most people will jump higher static off the ground than off the box. And the reason is their ground contact time is way too long and they dissipate way too much force. I forget the metrics that I believe you want to be beneath 0.28 seconds of ground contact time. I think that's the number. I struggle with this. So I'm still jumping higher from a static than off a box and my ground contact time is always north of 0.3 seconds. So this is one of the things I've been working on, not because I'm remotely interested in running fast, but because I'm interested in my feet becoming very good at load dissipation and load transfer and force transfer. So I think that's just a very important skill as you age, whether you're walking down a flight of stairs, whether you're hiking. But for a runner, I would suspect if you could get people down into a ground contact time of like, 0.2 to 0.25, that's going to translate to exactly what you're saying, because the way you describe it, like the sort of rolling foot on the ground, like, you're never going to get forced that way. You're just spending. You could be spending 0.6 seconds on the ground when you're rolling your foot across. Across it. Instead you want to be like, hitting it super quickly and getting up.

Yeah. You know what blows my mind about that, though? As we're talking about this, I'm just thinking. I'm sure you're familiar with Jim Ryan, right? Yeah. So I'm just thinking about him, and somehow he was a heel striker. And, like, I know of, like, I think Dathan Ritzenheim is a heel striker. Abdi. I just saw him the other day up in Flagstaff. He's also a heel striker. And, like, how are these guys running so fast from heel striking? Like, is it a thing where, like, they could be much faster if they weren't heel striking? Or, like, is there some kind of advantageousness to that that we're not aware of or seen? I don't know. I'm super curious about that.

I would put it in what you said earlier. It might be that a combination of a. There are just some people who really adapt to a certain way of doing things, and it might be that they run really well despite that. But. But everything I've read on this subject matter and all the experts I've spoken to suggest that forefoot to toe striking is the way we were meant to run. If you go back and look at how our ancestors ran and you look at really how force transfer would be most efficient, you don't want to be striking on the heel.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. But, yeah, it's interesting to see people getting away with it. But I'm with you. I'm always interested in not what can you get away with, but what is optimal. Right. So I think it's easy to do that. When you look at, like, how the Africans train. Like, we've spent a lot of time training in Kenya and Ethiopia. And like, they don't even go cool down. And these are the best runners in the world, on the planet, and they don't go cool down. And I'm like, we learned to cool down in like middle school, cross country and the importance of that, you know, and you find yourself being like, well, maybe they got it right. Maybe we shouldn't be cooling down. But I always remind myself, like, well, what is all optimal? That's really what I'm after. Not what can you get away with.

Yeah, I've gotten so off track. I wanted to kind of go through a bunch of other things, but I just want to now geek out on all this other stuff. But I think just for folks to have a bit of a sense of your trajectory because we've touched on so many things. I mean, we very quickly, just in passing throughout there, the Houston Marathon, where you became the first American to break an hour, and you still hold the American record for that. A record that may stand for some time. But let's go back. You're growing up in Big Bear, your dad an amazing baseball player, and you were typical baseball, basketball, et cetera. Didn't pick up running, if I recall, till you were like 13 or something.

Yeah, correct. Yeah. You did your homework, Peter.

Yeah, man. And you did like your first run. You just decided, dad, I want to run around the lake. That's a 15 mile run. How much did that hurt?

Oh, it was the pain train the whole time. There was no, like, magic to that run. Right. It was like just suffering. The whole time I was in basketball shoes, I had no idea what I was doing. My legs just felt like they just got pounded into a million little pieces like halfway through it. So, I mean, we had to stop multiple times. We stopped at a liquor store and got like a Sobeys, like a drink or whatever and stopped and ice my legs. And really, like, if my dad wasn't there, I probably wouldn't have made it around the lake. But that was such a learning experience for me now as a dad of. For myself being like, how do we respond to our kids and their crazy ideas? You know, like, this was just some like, crazy thing that I decided to do when I was 13. And yet look what it did. Like, it. It totally changed the trajectory of my entire life. Completely different now and just some crazy idea. It'd been very easy for my dad to be like, you know what, let's just start with like a 2 mile run instead of starting with a 15 mile run, you know, but that that wouldn't have captured me in the same way. Like, I needed a hook that was just gonna be like, I'm forever changed. Like, the trajectory of my life is never gonna be the same. Like, I needed something big like that. And I'm so glad that he didn't try and gun down my ideas, just like, all right, if you want to do, let's go do it.

I can't imagine that pain, actually, because I had a very similar experience at a far smaller distance when I was maybe 12, and I just woke up one day and I was like, I want to go run five miles. I want to see how fast I can run five miles. And so I put on my crappy shoes and I went out and I ran five miles, and it hurt so much. It hurt so much. And the next day I was like, I'm going to do it again. And I went out and I did it again, and it hurt so much. And I went out and I did it the third day, and it hurt so much. And then something on the fourth day changed. And on the fourth day, I felt awesome. And then I just never stopped. Just sort of adding more distance from there. But when you think about how nonlinear running is, like, if I was feeling that pain at 5 miles, 5 miles is a quarter of 13 in terms of effort. So what was going through your mind at the five mile mark, at the eight mile mark, Were you thinking, I love this pain. I love proving to myself that I can do this, or was the part of you thinking, why am I doing this?

I mean, there are so many thoughts. That's the thing about distance running. It's really like, what's going on in your head is hugely important, right? And so, like, now, like, when I'm training athletes on the mental aspect of it, I tell them, like, you got to have a whole bunch of different, like, arrows essentially, that you can pull out and use. Because it's like, sometimes you use one thing, it doesn't work. You got to go to something else, and it doesn't work. So I have all these different tactics and managing pain and discomfort. But, like, honestly, like, one of the biggest ones that is most helpful for me is simply turning the mind off. You just turn the mind off, and you just, like, keep putting one foot in front of the other. It sounds so simple and so basic. But, like, I can tell you, like, the last 5K of the Boston Marathon, when I'm in a world of pain and just trying to get to the finish line as fast as I can. There's no, like, profound thoughts going in through here. It's just like, put one foot in front of the other as fast as you can. Like, it's that simple. So in those moments, like, oftentimes I'm just like, turn the brain off and just keep moving. Just keep moving. And a lot of it's just like, too, like, refusing to believe that you can't take one more step. Like, you get yourself. At least I get myself in trouble. When I start thinking too far down the road, I'm like, like, oh, I still have so far to go. There's no way I could possibly do this. Like, you get overwhelmed by the scope of the challenge sometimes, especially when you're trying to do something you've never done, and that's worse than the actual discomfort you're feeling. Right? It's that being overwhelmed thing is not a good feeling at all. And that's what makes people give up and give in. So if you can bring yourself back to the present to what you're doing right now, what I found is there's always enough to get me through this moment. There's not always enough to get me through, like, what's coming all down the line. If I try to just, like, I'm going to handle all of it right now, it's like, no, just do what's right in front of you. Just handle this mile that you're in right now. Which is why, you know, I wrote my book entitled run the mile you're in. Because it's just like, you just got to bring yourself back to being present in this moment. And there's always enough to get you through this moment.

One of the things about running that strikes me as difficult in that regard is you can't dissociate yourself from the visual cues of how much lies ahead. I used to swim long distances, and there were a couple of really dogmatic rules that we had in ultra distance swimming, and one of them was never look up towards shore. Like, you only know you're coming to land when you start to see the bottom of the ocean. Like, when you're, you know, and that you typically don't get that until you're, like, half a mile from shore. But this idea that you would ever lift your head up to look forward is a total disaster. And I got a really bad taste of that on a swim that I was doing. It was a training swim across Lake Tahoe. So this was not supposed to be a very difficult swim. This was a 12 mile swim. And that should have taken a little under six hours. But I didn't do my homework, I didn't hire a good boat captain, and he didn't understand the navigation. So to make a very long story short, we didn't go across the lake. We zigzagged across the lake and when we hit this five hour mark, in my head I'm thinking I should only be two miles from shore. So I look up at him and I say, how much further do we have? And he says, about two miles. And I say, or maybe four miles or something. I forget what the number was, but it made sense. Whatever he said made sense. And then I stupidly looked towards the shore and had a mental image of what it looked like. I couldn't see the trees or anything like that, and it couldn't make out details. So I just put my head down and hammered for one more hour, thinking, okay, but in an hour I should see the bottom of Lake Tahoe coming up at me. And I didn't. It looked exactly the same. And I lifted my head up and it looked exactly the same. Meaning we were much further than he told me we were. And that is the closest I've ever come to like quitting a swim. I was mentally destroyed. And then I said, how far are we? And he said, I don't know, I think like four miles. And I was like, come on, what are you talking about? You can't mess with a swimmer. I mean, I was so pissed off. But again, why was I pissed off? I was pissed off because I had an idea in my mind that was so far ahead. I wasn't in the mile, right? I wasn't in that moment. And I think for runners, you don't have the luxury that a swimmer does to literally. I could swim with my eyes closed. I can really drown out all of that other stuff. And you gave that example of being in Beijing. And it's not just that, you know, you're in 60th, it's that you see the helicopter that's over the leaders and they're a quarter mile up the road. That requires an extra level of mental fortitude in my mind to be able to run your race at that point.

Yeah, yeah. And like I said, it all comes back to getting excited. Right. If you're gonna perform well, you gotta be excited about how you're doing. So it's like, how can you get excited? Not just like, like make it through that moment, but find something to get excited about in that moment, you know? So I talk A lot about, like, reframing things in your mind. And that to me is like one of the most helpful things that I use all the time. Right. So, like, for example, I was just doing this crazy challenge, it's called chop Wood carry water, where I split a cord of wood at my house in Flagstaff and then drove to the Grand Canyon. Ran down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon holding these seven gallon water jugs.

Yeah, these are the big blue ones, right?

Yeah, they weigh like 62 pounds each when they're full. So I was running down there. It's a 10k run, 6.3 mile run down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You drop 5,000ft and then got to the Colorado river, fill them up and then farmer carry them out of the Grand Canyon. And I remember being down at the bottom and filling up those jugs and just being like looking up and. And having just run all down that. And I was like, like, what did I get myself into? Like, the sun was already getting down super low. And that was the hardest part of the whole challenge for me was like just starting it out right, Because I knew, I knew it was waiting for me. I knew how far I had to go.

So just to be clear, you carried 63 pounds in each hand of water up 6.3 miles. Basically a grade of, I don't know, 7 or 8%, I'm guessing, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think it's like 7% grade. Yeah. So 5,000.

How long did that take you?

Six hours? Yeah, it was. It was a long one.

Help me understand what your hands were doing. Were you using grip? Did you have like wraps around your hands or something?

No, no, just. Just hand in it. I have good calluses on my hands from all the lifting I've been doing. But yeah, I mean, my hands took a beating, but actually interesting. It was more cardio than it was strength.

Did you ever have to stop and put them down?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can only carry them like 50 meters at a time. So it was a lot of carries. Yeah.

That is actually more insane than your deadlift 500 pounds run a five minute mile attempt, which also was super impressive. But this farmer's carry thing is ridiculous, actually.

It was such a crazy experience, you know, but I was talking about reframing and I had to reframe a lot in that, you know, because I thought I was like, oh, I think it'll take me like four hours to carry these out. And our goal was to try to beat the sun. But like I said, the sun was already like, it was like three, four o' clock when we got down to the bottom. So I was just like found myself wanting to get frustrated about how this was going, how long this was going to take. I'm never going to get out of here. All those thoughts are going through my mind, you know, and I just had to like reframe it and come to peace with like what was happening out there and just accept it and then get excited about it, you know, Like I was looking at the moon is coming up is so epic. Like it was dark. All my buddies are there cheering for me, giving me food and water and stuff. It was just such a beautiful experience. But I had to reframe it to be able to see it that way. Because how I was seeing it at the bottom of the canyon was like, oh man, this is going to suck what I get myself into. I don't know if I can get out of here, like all those negative thoughts. But then as I was able to accept it and then reframe it, then I was able to embrace this really beautiful experience. And one that was life changing for me, that I'll never forget getting to the top of that canyon and putting those jugs down and how good it felt to finish that thing. But I had to change how I was thinking about the whole situation, which is what you have to do when you're in a race and it's not unfolding how you want it to unfold.

Well, I can relate to that on a number of my swims where things didn't go well. But you're right, there's something about saying, I'm not going to quit. I'm going to put my head down and I'm going to do this. When you get to the other end, it's pretty remarkable. And I've had the ability to be, you know, coaching people when they do swims and in, in swimming, once you touch the boat or anything, you're disqualified. So it's a very. You can have zero assistance out there. And one of the things that I learned from watching other coaches and then I would do it with people is whenever a swimmer says they want to quit, I wouldn't let them do it right. I would say, no, no, no, not going to let you do this. You got to give me another 10 minutes and then we'll talk again. And if they still want to quit, I say I need another 10 minutes and then we talk and then I make them do this three times. And part of it is just to show them that they can swim another 30 minutes. So if you can swim another 30 minutes, you could probably swim another four hours or whatever the amount is. But also, you realize, like, and this sounds so cruel, but you also tell them, like, you make sure they understand that what they're doing is you want to quit right now. Just to be clear, you're saying you want to quit doing this thing right now, Is that right? Yes. Okay, well, after 30 minutes, then, fine, you can come on out. But I guess there's just no substitute for that feeling of when you finish. Although that literally strikes me as the hardest physical thing I could ever imagine doing. Say more about what the cardio struggle of that was. Like, are you kind of in a slow jog trot? Like, what, what kind of pace were you moving at?

Basically a fast walk. You know, you. You want to make your legs and heart do as much of the work as possible because just holding that much weight in your hand becomes an issue, you know? But really the reason why I'd say is even harder than running a marathon is when you're running a marathon, like, my heart rate's usually around 167. I have a really low heart rate to begin with.

What's your maximum heart rate?

I don't know what it would be now at that time, though, I. I couldn't get it over 200. It's probably like 195, 197. Like I had a resting heart rate of 27 when I was at my fittest. Like, it was. I've always had a really low heart rate, but it gets super low now. It's nowhere near that. But all that to say, like, usually the first 20 miles of marathon, or maybe the first 17 miles, like, feels pretty good. You're conversational. You're floating along like, it's just, just fun, you know, you're just enjoying the ride. And then of course, like, it gets really hard and you got to grit down and bear it. Whereas this was just like, it was like I was doing interval training because I was right, like going like 30 second carries. Set it down, Take as minimal rest as possible.

And what would a typical rest be when you did that 30 seconds on.

Yeah, like 30 seconds off kind of thing. I would just go till I caught my breath and go again. So it was like I'm breathing super hard when I set it down, catch my breath just to where I'm breathing normally again and then go again. So just like I was breathing. If you listen to the video, which we're going to have a Whole video coming out here. Pretty soon, like you'll hear me just breathing super hard like a truck, like the whole time. And it's like six hours straight of doing that was the most intense thing I've ever done before. Like I'm not used to breathing that hard the whole time.

How much did you drink? Do you have a sense of what volume you consumed of water or.

And whatever the amount of water and calories I was taking, it was insane. My buddy was helping me, a lot of buddies helping me. But one guy was just in charge of doing my food and water. After every third carry I'm taking in water and then I'm taking in sugar. Like I was eating gummy worms like a maniac. I probably took in like, like 3, 000 calories coming up from the canyon because I was just burning so much because I'm like 183 pounds plus carrying 124 pounds of water weight and you're going up 5, 000ft. So my body was just like my metabolism was unreal. But that was a big part about being and why I wanted to do this. So check this out. Like the biggest. To me, the most important part of training, whether it's run training or weightlifting training, is consistency. And it blows my mind what my body's capable of doing and my athletes are capable of doing when you're just consistent. So when I was training for this, I never did longer. Well, twice I did longer, but for the most part I did 20 minute carries every other day. So that was all the training I did. 20 minute carries, 20 minutes with basically.

The same weight, 60, call it 65 pounds in each hand. And you would do the same thing. 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off for 20 minutes.

Yep. And then off of that I was able to do six hour carry out of the canyon.

And did you do that at grade as well?

Not on flat, no, just flat. Which, you know, like I, I could have trained for it better but like I'm a full time dad. I got my lifting that I'm into. I coach my wife, I have online training business, run free training. So I have a ton of stuff going. I don't have time to go do like our water carries. But plus it's easy to be consistent when it's 20 minutes. Right. Like I can't find an excuse and be like, oh, I don't have 20 minutes. Like I would get home late at night and put on the headlamp and if I hadn't done my Carry, go do my carry. Because 20 minutes is nothing, right? I can be consistent with that. Whereas if I'm trying to be like, okay, every other day I'm gonna do an hour. Nope, I'm not gonna be able to stick to that, you know? So I think a big part about being successful in running fitness is like, just make the bar low, make it easy to be consistent, right? So, yeah, I did all that off 20 minute carries. But I knew what is super important in doing any kind of ultra stuff is fueling. So I knew, I was like, if I take in enough calories and I stay hydrated, I'm gonna be okay. I can get through anything.

But how much did you need to experiment with that? Because that was something I experimented with a lot of in my own very, very, very modest forms of endurance training was learning the fuel and making dumb mistakes sometimes. I did this one training swim many years ago and it was kind of your penultimate. It was the longest training swim I would do before the actual swim. So it was like a 24 mile swim. So I did an 18 mile was the last training swim. And someone had told me, hey, a really good way to avoid getting the runs is to take like, I forget.

What it is, like Imodium.

Imodium, yeah, exactly. It was Imodium. And I was like, well, you know, it's funny, I've never had the runs when swimming, but I hate to get it. I should try, I should see what happens if I take Imodium before this swim. So sure enough, and of course, like an idiot, I don't just take the recommended dose, I take 2x the recommended dose. And so I'm out there and I think at that time my regimen was 200 milliliters of fluid every 20 minutes. So 600 milliliters an hour of fluid multiplied by, I think that turned into a seven, maybe an eight hour swim. And the last four miles I was about to. I thought I was going to die. Like, I was so bloated. And it didn't really occur to me why, because it was like, you know, eight hours earlier that I had taken the Imodium, right? I'd never put two and two together that this was the problem. So we finally, we started in La Jolla, swam up to like, I don't know, Solana beach, and then swam back down. And when, when we get back to shore and my friend who is guiding me pulls the kayak on the beach and I pick up the kayak to carry it with him. So I'm in the Front of the kayak. He's in the back. We're carrying it on the beach. It's like this beautiful day in La Jolla. Families are playing everywhere. This kid had dug a big hole in the ground next to his sandcastle. And. And as we walked by it, I just went and I just puked. Like, literally, it looked like 8 liters of whatever it was. I was drinking, like hammer strength something or other into this hole. And I was like, all right, note to self, man. Imodium. Not for swims, but that's a dumb example. But you mentioned the amount of sugar you're consuming. But I know some athletes who just cannot put sugar in. They get really sick. They have to use more complex carbohydrates. So how empirical were you both? Let's go back to your marathon training when it was everything's on the line. This is your job. How deliberate were you in figuring out what was the right ratio of goo vs rice vs potato vs all of it in liquid? How did you figure all that out?

I mean, we were super specific with it when I was running professionally. And I think the running professionally, my experiences there carried over into this challenge, right? So from my experience and a lot of our athletes experience, like, you can train your gut to take in stuff. It's when you throw new stuff at it that it's not used to when you have, you know, adverse reactions like you're having for us, Number one, I'm loading for two days before the marathon. And that was taken from, like a nutritionist I was working with. He's like, hey, listen, like, spread this load out. Like you don't want to blow it up and, like, be feeling terrible the day before this race load for two days leading up to it. So what that would look like is I'd eat 400 calories of carbohydrate additional to what I'd normally eat when I'm training hard, right? So I wouldn't be like, oh, I'm not running that much the last couple of days, so I'm going to cut down how much I'm eating. I would still eat like I was training and the 400 extra calories of carb. And I keep those carbs super simple because, you know, like, a lot's going on with nerves and jitters leading up to your race. You just want to make it as easy on your system. There's a time and place for complex carbs and high fiber diet and all that stuff. Like, usually that's like how we're eating, but the days before race, we're keeping it super, super simple, right? With the carb intake, I was big on like the white rice, pasta, sourdough bread I really like because it's lower glycemic index, but it digests really easy. Maltodextrin is a carb that I really like to take in. And you gotta be careful. I've had some bad experiences with other branded stuff that's like supposed to like, like I forget what it's called, like glucose aid or one of those things. I tried that before racetown. My athletes tried and they had a terrible time with their stomach. So you never want to try something new leading up to a race you haven't tried before. So always try it in training. That's just like a given, you know. But I love maltodextrin because it's a liquid calorie. So if I'm not hungry and it's tasteless, so I can mix it up with the protein powder, shake it up, shoot it down.

So for you, that was what, rice and potatoes?

That's actually what my pre race meal was, was a liquid meal. Because I'd wake up from all this carb loading I'm doing the day before and I'd wake up really full and then I'd eat anyways. So like three hours before the race, take my shake with the protein powder, maltodextrin, a little bit of olive oil in there as a healthy fat to help slow things down a little bit more. And then I was taking a gel right on the starting line, sipping on water the whole time. And then we're. We would actually how I did my bottles and we get. So we get bottles every 5k, so we get to put them out on a table. You can put whatever you want in it. You could strap a gel to it if you want. But how I always did things is we would. Would make them not very concentrated the first bottle, and then they'd get increasingly concentrated as the race was going on, and then they get decreasingly concentrated later in the race. And the reason for that was it's easier to absorb things when you're not as tired. So you kind of want to make sure you're front loading your carb intake during a marathon because your body can just process it a lot easier. I mean, when you get to 40k of marathon, like you don't feel like taking in carbs at all. So oftentimes we grab that bottle, we take a swig of it, and then it tricks your body to think it's getting carbs and then we just spit it out. We wouldn't even drink it. But your body thinks, oh, carbs are on the way. Like, and it responds, like, as if it's going to get carbs, but doesn't get anything. So that would give you a little jolt of energy just with 2k to go there. But typically, yeah, the. The bottles would be not as concentrated, more concentrated. We put a gel at 15k and a gel at 30k, and that gel at 30k would be a caffeinated gel. Again, just to get a little bit more of a hit of caffeine. We time our caffeine intake to where we're taking it also. Like 75 minutes prior to race start. Yeah. And caffeine's a really interesting thing to talk about. I'm, like, intrigued by that one because that was one of the things that when it came on board, it was like, oh, there's no going back. Like, I couldn't imagine doing a race without caffeine. And yet, like, people have such different experiences with it. You know, I've learned from, like, science recently how it does, like, increase your core temperature, which is kind of detrimental to endurance activities. But the thing that's interesting is I understand the science behind that, but that just hasn't been my experience at all. Like, I am 100% faster with caffeine on board than without caffeine on board. And I've tried both ways.

Did you ever experiment with Tylenol?

No. No, I never did.

So there's some really interesting research. And I was actually talking about this a couple weeks ago with Lance Armstrong. I don't know how it came up, but we were talking about. And same thing. He had never used Tylenol in the Tour. It's a pretty remarkable performance enhancing drug. Perfectly legal. Right. WADA has not banned Tylenol to my knowledge, but we're talking about like a 1 to 2% performance boost.

Wow.

It's not entirely clear if it comes through the temperature reduction or the pain reduction, but it was absolutely part of my stack during time trials.

Interesting.

So, you know, a time trial is like basically an hour of threshold. Right. It's super painful, and I feel like I was getting like a 1, 2, maybe even at times a 3% performance gain from Tylenol. And I would take like a thousand milligrams an hour before the race.

Interesting.

So I'm curious if other athletes have tried that.

I'm not familiar with other athletes trying it, but I'm definitely gonna try that with My athletes now.

Yeah, I would give it a try. And again, it's. We don't even really know how Tylenol works, so it's for such a common medication. We don't actually understand its mechanism of action, but it is a very good medication at keeping temperature down, which is obviously its first indication is to lower, you know, for fever. But it also reduces pain and it does it in a way that's different from NSAIDs. And outside of needing to be careful on the dose because obviously it is a, it's a very liver toxic drug at high doses, but within normal amounts, like, you know, a thousand milligrams, you know, it's an incredibly safe drug. And it would be curious to know how much of a benefit your athletes would get on that and how much you would get from it.

Yeah, I'll try that. Is there any application to lifting? If it's keeping your core temperature down, I assume that'd be helpful for lifting as well.

I don't know. I haven't seen the literature on lifting. You know where I did see literature on lifting? And this is freaking hilarious. This was probably like eight years ago. I saw some papers that looked at how Viagra improved lifting performance. So of course I went out and got a ton of Viagra. And in the end I couldn't do it. And not for the reasons that most people would imagine. The reason I couldn't do it is just the symptoms. I was getting so lightheaded from it because it's a vasodilator in part. My blood pressure is not that high. It's actually kind of low. And so maybe I just couldn't tolerate the sort of lightheadedness that came from it. But the research was actually pretty compelling. At 25-50mg of Viagra boosting strength. Performance and not just strength, actually. If I recall, it was more of muscular endurance, not strength, actually.

Okay.

And I didn't find the difference because of the symptoms that I had because of the side effects. But that might be another thing worth experimenting with is kind of that 25-50mg of Viagra to see what does that do as far as not a mean maximal effort, but a submaximal effort repeatedly. So probably you'd see more of that on your best 10 rep deadlift as opposed to your max deadlift.

Okay, that's interesting. So speaking of core temperature, have you played it all with Palmer Cooling?

No.

Are you familiar with that at all?

No. I mean, I used to check my core temp before and after long swims, because we had the opposite problem. You're swimming in cold water. So sometimes I'd actually swim with a rectal probe just to see. And usually your temp would drop, like, 4, 5 degrees. So you'd start at 98 or 99, and I'd come out of the water at 93, 94. You were getting a performance detriment when your temperature went too low. So really, we really operate in this pretty narrow band of temperature, Right. Too much and too little is. Is pretty bad, right?

Yeah, it's interesting. Like Dr. Huberman out of Stanford, neuroscientist, he talks about Palmer Cooling. So we've been playing with that a little bit. Like, there's some pretty remarkable research coming out at Stanford about the effects of that, both in strength training and in the endurance space. It's a little bit.

So how does it work?

So the best ways to dump heat, core temp, through your body is through your face, your upper face, where there's no hair, and then also through your hands in the bottom of your feet. So they develop this glove, and they've had this for years. Like, this was there at Stanford when we were coming out. You put your hands in this glove and you dump heat. And the thing is, you don't want it too cold, right? So you don't want it, like, icy cold, just cool. So that doesn't dilate, vasodilation or constrict. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. And so then you're dumping all your heat out, brings your core temp down, and then you're good to go after that. So we've been playing a little bit with that, with, like, holding cold packs in your hands and in between lifts, like holding cold things or putting your hands in cool water, dumping your tent. And that's. That's kind of like one thing that we're playing with a little bit more. But it makes a lot of sense to me. It's like, why humans can do these persistence hunts, you know, where they go and chase down animals. It's because the animal, like, overheats. It's not as good at dumping temperature, whereas, like, humans are better at regulating temperature. So if you can keep your temperature in that kind of optimal range, in theory, it should, like, increase your endurance as well. So, yeah, there's always, like, I love, like, exploring this stuff and trying new tactics out like that.

So when you mention this, now, I do recall I have experimented with this with what's called a cooling helmet. So I had this helmet. It had inserts into it that you would put in the freezer. So, like, gel packs that you would freeze and you would put this thing on your head. So I would ride on my trainer with this cooling helmet, and it definitely made a difference, but for some reason, I could never bring myself to do it in a race or something like that. But the other thing I've noticed on that effect was just this summer. So this was my first summer living in Austin. And obviously it gets super hot in Austin in the summer, hotter than I'm used to in Southern California. And when I drive a race car, I've never used any form of cooling device before, so I always just drive. You got a fire suit on. So you have no max suit on. You got a race suit on. And especially when you drive a closed cockpit car. So not a formula car. You're not getting the wind as you're driving. And of course, these cars are hot as hell because these are race cars. There's no air conditioning, and you're just. You've got all this engine heat coming at you, so you really get hot. And I've always just sort of suffered through this, even though so many people I know say invest in a cooling vest. So you have these vests that run ice water around your torso. And. And I was always like, I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't need that. I got this. I got this. I got this. And so finally one day, my friend was like, dude, just try it. I mean, game changer, total game changer to drive a racing car with a cooling vest on under hot conditions.

So tell me more about this cooling vest, because we play with these things as well. I have kind of like the archaic ones. It's like, you put it, you fill it up, it turns into gel, and then you freeze it, and it's just like, it slowly, like, gets back to temperature. But do these. Do you actually, like, plug them in or how does it stay cool?

Yeah, this would not be great for a runner because it would be too heavy. But so it's a. It's a shirt, actually. And it has really, really fine, whatever, little cables running up and down it. And it. It has a little box that runs cold water through you up and down, up and down, up and down. And in the car, it's easy. You just. You have a power unit. You're running it out of the car. It did occur to me, is there a way, let's say the thing weighs an extra six pounds. What would be the cost trade Off. If you were on a bike with one of these things, could one of these things be engineered to only add maybe four or five pounds, which would, of course, be detrimental on the bike, but would it offset by the performance gain you'd have? But obviously, in a car, it's an enormous performance booster, especially in closed cockpit cars. In formula cars, it's not as big a deal because you don't get as hot. You're getting so much air blown on you. But it blew my mind what a difference the temperature would make in terms of performance and everything. Like, even that night when you're done, the difference between the day you use it and the day you don't is the difference between feeling like you're going to die and feeling like, yeah, I'm tired, but I'm okay.

Yeah, And I bet you're, like, mentally in a lot better place too, right? It's like when you're all super hot or super cold, it's so easy to go mental really quick. So I bet it helps a ton for your focus as well, for sure.

And even little silly things, you're perspiring less. And even though you wear a head sock, a balaclava, anytime sweat is getting in your eyes, it's super annoying. You want to keep your hands on the steering wheel. So anything that they can get around that. So how do you implement that in a runner then? Obviously, I can see how in strength training you can use that, but if you're running, you're training a guy to run a marathon. How can you incorporate any of these cooling things into the actual race?

Yeah, so I think part of it is, like, especially for guys who train in hot and humid places is just having it available beforehand. Right. So at least, like, after you do your warmup, you do your drills and strides, you're getting your core temperature back down by doing some heat dumping with your hands. And then if you're doing training, such as interval training, you know, you can get it in between sets. So I'll have, like, a bucket of cold water at the track, and just between sets, go put your hands in there, dump a bunch of heat, and then back at it. And it definitely. I feel like it makes a big difference, you know, I feel like it's super helpful, but in terms of, like, applying it while you're actually running, that's where you got to get more creative. So we've done things with, like, these packs that you break. You know, those instant cold packs. Break those open and just hold them and you. You only have to do it for like, I think like two minutes is kind of ideal to hold them for that long, which is kind of a long time. That's kind of a hindering. But if it's worth the trade and you're getting the performance benefit from it, then it's, you know, maybe worth it. But yeah, like, I'm curious. I haven't tried the, the gloves that they have at Stanford that they use on the football team and a lot of the athletic programs. But again, like, you can't stop your run in the middle of a race and put your hands in some cold glove. But who knows like what the application could be? It just requires someone to get creative with it, you know, and figure out a way to make it more applicable to running. Like when you're mentioning like the biking, I was like, oh, it'd be cool if they could make like somehow the handles be colder, you know, put some kind of technology in there so then you're getting polymer cooling while your hands are on the handles, like, things like that. They could find a way to do it in a lightweight way. Could be like really powerful, you know.

Yeah, that's actually a great idea. If it could be done again really light. Because these days most bikes are coming in at below the UCI limit of whatever it is now 14.9 pounds. So most, most cyclists actually have to add ballast to their bikes. In the Tour de France, most cyclists are actually adding weight to their bikes to get them up to legal weight. So yeah, there's definitely a bit of room to play with there. I don't know how much, but that would be pretty cool. So speaking of Stanford, that's where you go to college. I assume you were recruited very heavily to every top running powerhouse program there was, right?

Yeah, which was cool because I was in the middle of five kids growing up and my dad was a teacher, my mom's a stay at home mom. So we were always like pension pennies. So I knew like part of running for me is like, if I'm gonna go to a good college, like I'm have to earn my way there kind of thing, you know. So yeah, it was pretty cool to like be getting recruited all over the place. And it's funny because Stanford was the one place I was like, I'm definitely not going to Stanford because I wasn't heavily focused on academics in high school. I knew the academics, like, they don't cut slack to athletes there. Like we're in it just like everyone else, you know, like there's not a lot of special Assistance going on. So. So I knew it'd be like, academically a super big challenge for me as well as, like, the athletic part. And I was like, I don't know, I just don't want to put myself in that kind of a challenging space. And it was super challenging. Like, it was three years of really big struggle. And then, you know, I hit one cross country season really well, was a part of a NCAA winning team. Two years there in cross country. And then my fourth year at Stanford, things just clicked. And that's the thing I love about running and fitness in general. It's like everything can be going so wrong for so long and then yet, like, when, when things start to click, it's such a good feeling when you push through and you get to that point where it's just coming, you know, the weight's coming off the ground easy, and it's such a cool feeling. That was the sensation I had during that fourth year. Me and my teammate, Ian Dobson went 12 in track. And at that point, like, I was. I was having a very lackluster career at Stanford. Never even been to NCAA championships in track. But again, in running, it doesn't matter, right? It's just you and the clock and the other guys out there and everything was clicking. We went 12 NCS, and all of a sudden it was like, deals are coming in. And I had the opportunity to run professionally and same for my wife Sarah, and we. We. I was planning on coming back for a fifth year, but because things clicked so well that year, I'd seen some of my other teammates come through Stanford, have a really good fourth year, and then not do well their fifth year and then have no contract. Right.

Did you redshirt your first year?

Yeah, red shirt. My freshman year, I was like, I said I was on the struggle bus. I was hurt, I was injured, I was sick. I'd get poison oak every winter. Like, it was like the. The perfect combination of everything going wrong. I was struggling academically. I struggled with depression. Actually left Stanford for a quarter my sophomore year. Wasn't sure if I was going to go back. You know, I thought in that situation that I could change what was going on inside my head and heart by changing my location. So I was like, I'm go back home, the last place. Everything was clicking for me and everything was working. I was sick of the struggle, you know, And I went back home and got even more depressed. And I was like, well, that. That was stupid. Like, go back to where I knew I was supposed to be and that was Stanford. So went back there and then things gradually started to get better and. But yeah, I had my struggles at Stanford. You know, like it was a beautiful place to go to school, Love the people, the environment. I still like to go back and visit there. But it was for the most part like a big, big struggle in all areas, athletically, academically. But again I hit it that fourth year and then the doors came open to run professionally and left the farm after that.

What do you think changed and clicked? Like what, what do you think you were struggling with from a running perspective? Because I think in high school you ran a 402 mile, which I know you wanted to break that four minute barrier, which is pretty rarefied error. Isn't Jim Ryan and Alan Webb the only two to do that or has someone else now broken four minutes for the mile in high school?

Yeah, at the time when I was running there was only four guys who had done it. So you had Jim Ryan, two other guys blanking on their name, then Alan and I was the same year you mentioned swimming with Alan. I love Alan. Good friends with him, such a good dude. But yeah, I remember watching him run 353 at pre and it was just like my head exploded. It was like, I can't believe I just saw that. That was just like out of this world.

That was unbelievable. And then he went to Michigan and struggled, right?

Yep, he struggled his sophomore year. Yeah, him and I like have a lot of parallels. Even like the year that we both hit it big, 2007, he set the AR in the mile, I set the AR in the half. And we were like crossing paths all the time too. Like I was his roommate over in Europe in 2007. When we were over there racing that summer, we were both struggling for various reasons, but we both have very high highs and very low lows. Alan and I are pretty similar that way, you know, but he's definitely like one of the most talented runners I've ever seen. Like the amount of talent that guy has, he just, he, he has such a good work ethic that sometimes it comes back to bite him. Like we'd be on the track in Europe and he go to does his run and then he's doing like, like hurdle drills and plyos and all this stuff for like hours afterwards and we're all like have left and we're showered up and eating and he's like still out there grinding, right. So he just like would be so intensely focused that when it was clicking it was great. But I Think sometimes he kind of overcooked himself a little bit, but, man, such an immense talent, and it was so cool to get to see him have his moment, you know, run 346 for the mile was. He was just. He was insane that year. He was just on fire. He's just untouchable. If the Olympics would have been that year, he'd been a gold medalist, without a doubt.

Do you remember his Olympic trials in 04 in Sacramento when he just ran away from the field? That's, again, just one of those moments I remember because that was actually the summer that I think 03 and 04 were the summers that I saw him the most at the pool. And you wouldn't believe that that was a 1500 in terms of the margin of victory he had over those guys. Right. That looked like a 5,5000 or a 10K in terms of how far ahead he was of everybody else.

Yeah. I mean, he was so dominant when he was on. Like, people weren't beating him. He was. He was impossible to beat. So he was fun to watch in his. In his prime.

So what do you think changed in your senior year?

Oh, yeah, yeah, we were talking about that. Huh.

I know I keep distracting you. I'm doing a horrible job here today. I keep taking us on these tangents, and I just. Yeah, this is more of a dinner conversation than a podcast.

Yeah, no, I like it. I like it. It. So funny thing is, I'm always very concerned with the nuts and bolts of training what I'm doing. Right. That's always my focus as an athlete. And yet what I've kind of the lesson that I've had to learn from the time I've gotten into sports since a kid until now at 39, is like, it's way more important how I do what I'm doing, meaning, like, my heart condition, what's going on in my head, than what I'm actually doing. So, like, for example, like, my tendency is to try to prove myself in training to myself. Like. Like, I'm not really trying to prove myself to anyone else. I just want to know I'm fit, I'm ready to go. Right? So oftentimes I'll come to these workouts and I'm racing them. It's like I'm going head down, like, all out. Like, everything I have inside me, oftentimes I'm going harder and training than I'm going in racing. Right. And yet, like, that is not the best way for my body to absorb the work. Like, I need to be making Deposits, not making withdrawals when I'm training. So if I, if I go into these workouts confident in who I am, knowing the purpose of the workout, then I'm in a much better place. I'm absorbing the training a lot better. So what happened, to answer your question, was my identity was all wrapped up in my performances, right? So. And that's why I struggle with depression, is I would look in the mirror in the morning, I was struggling with my running, I was hurt, I was frustrated with how things were going, I wasn't getting better. And so I just saw myself as a failure. And it's very difficult to have that, that happen every single morning. Get up, look in the mirror, Failure, failure, failure, failure, you know? And so when I went back home, like, my faith has always been a huge part of my life. And I, I started to realize, like, I need to see myself. How God sees me, and how God sees me has nothing to do with my performance, Right. It's like, think about, like, your kids, right? Like, you don't really care how good they are at a certain sport, right? Like, you love them, right?

It's unconditional who they are.

Yeah. And so, like, can I love myself that same way? Oftentimes, like, we're able to love other people and treat other people a lot better than we actually treat ourselves in our mind, you know? And so I started to kind of get to the bottom of that and be like, you know what? Like, God loves me regardless of how I do. So I'm gonna choose on a daily basis. It wasn't a one time thing. It's still something I have to cultivate to this day of like, I'm choose to love myself regardless of how I'm performing, right? Like, what, what really makes me special has nothing to do with how fast I am or how much weight I can lift or any of those things. And as that began to sink in, it took all the pressure off myself. Like, I was just carrying around this, like, heavy burden to every single workout, every single race. Because if I wasn't proving to myself that I was important by running fast, I was hating myself. Right? And so as I took these weights off and be like, no, actually I'm cool with who I am. Like, actually I love myself whether I have a great workout or a bad workout that just took the weights off. And it also made me fearless too. It's like, okay, now I can go out and just air it out and I'm gonna fail a bunch of times. And I can live with that. I'M okay with that, right? So there's something powerful about coming to peace with the worst case scenario. And it might sound like a place you shouldn't go before a race, but oftentimes I do like to go there. I'm like, okay, like, I could go out with all these actions. African guys go out in under 62 minutes for the half marathon en route to a marathon at Boston. I might blow up, might not work out. Like, but, hey, I know I can handle that. I know I'm okay. I'm cool with myself if that happens, and I'm gonna give myself a shot, like. And I think that's what we're kind of lacking for a lot of American distance runners is the willingness to put yourself out there to take a big risk. And that's with Africans. Their mentality is just like. Like, no, you just go with the lead group, and if you blow up, don't take it personally, get up and go again the next time, right? Like, they don't take their failures personally. Whereas, like, Americans myself, like, I take it super personally, right? If I fail, that means I'm a failure. For them, it's like, if they fail, like, it. That's just a part of the process. Who cares? Like, just go again, you know? So as those weights were able to come off me, I approach my approach to workouts, to races change. Things started to click a lot better. A big thing is I learned also, too. Like, I didn't have to beat my work, my teammates in training anymore. Like, I could just work with them. I didn't have to try to drop them. Even if I could drop them, I was like, I don't need to. Like, I'm secure in who I am, you know? So that was a huge shift. But again, it wasn't like, all of a sudden and bam, the results came. It was like, years and years, and then it turned into something. So that was really the most freeing thing I think I've experienced in my career in terms of what's going on internally. That freed me up to enter into my full potential in running.

And despite how much of just this kind of very friendly person you are, I would imagine that you kind of alienated a lot of teammates when you came in with that mode of. Every workout is hammer time.

Yes, 100%. Like, I would go home over the summer, and usually it's supposed to be kind of like, chill base building training, right? And I would just train my brains out and I would come back and I would just be blasting everyone all the time. Yeah, I remember talking to now like one of my, my good friends and teammates, Ian Dobson. And he's a big reason why I did so well coming out of Stanford in my first years as a pro runner. He's like, dude, yeah, we used to like, not be a fan. Like, you're just always trying to like, like you'd always come back in super good shape and you're always taking it to us. And that changed, like, as I was able to work with guys, I got along a lot better with them. And I just learned, like, just communicate with people, right? Like, if I tell these guys, like, I'm working out with my teammates, hey, guys, like, I'm feeling really good. I'm just go a little bit bit quicker if that's cool. That's a lot different than just like taking off without saying anything. So for people who are working out in like group environments, like, it's crazy just how that little communication within the group can really shift things, the dynamics of the group, and make it to where, like, everyone's cool with what's happening and you're not just like throwing in random surges. And there's a lot of that that goes on and running within groups, like there's races and different characters and people who can't work out in groups and it gets a little bit intense at times. But if the communication is there, guys can work together and actually make each other better.

So when you turn Pro, is that what, 05?

Yeah.

And I think your lead sponsor is Asics at the time, right?

Yep. Correct.

So had it entered your mind yet that you would find your sweet spot in this half marathon to marathon world, or were you still thinking, I'm going to be a 5k, 10k guy? Like, what were you thinking in 05 was going to be the place where you would make your mark?

Yeah. So I never thought I'd run a marathon. I grew up like, loving the movie Prefontaine. And you know that scene where he's like, no one's gonna tell me I'm not fast enough, you know, but like, the truth is, like, I wasn't fast enough. I wanted to be a miler, right? And kind of like what we're chatting about earlier, the importance of speed, it's like only having I ran 50 for 400 in high school, but only having that kind of speed limited my upper end potential. I mean, in the 5,000 meters, guys are closing in 50, so if your top end speed is 50, you're gonna have a hard time closing in 52 right.

Your best 5k is like 13, 16, 16.

Yeah.

And put that in perspective. What's the American record in the 5K?

Good question. Where it's at now, it's around 1250, give or take. Okay, so at the time, like that was one of the faster times coming out of college. You know, things are definitely shifting a lot with the new shoe technology and stuff in terms of time. But yeah, at the time, like that was a pretty solid run. So. And that's why like coming off the wake of that, I spent a year professionally just focusing on the 5k. Didn't improve at all over the 5k. My 5k stayed roughly the same. I think I ran like 13, 20 something. 13:22 the next year and the Beijing Olympics were kind of on the horizon. The trials was coming up the following year. And it's kind of one of those things where I was like, I got to figure out, my vision for my running was always to run with the best guys in the world. In what event am I going to be most competitive in here? And you know, I'm 23 years old, I got to figure this out. And so I, there was all of a sudden an openness to longer distances. Whereas before I'd always been, like I said, very close minded, just being like, I just want to be a world class miler like Alan was.

So how many half marathons had you run before Houston in 070? That was your first half marathon?

Yeah, that was my first. I had run a couple 20ks, which is essentially the same thing. It's like a K less. Right. So. But yeah, I got worked on the track that first year and I'll never forget I was in London. I was racing against Bekele, which is the world record holder at the time, over 5,000 meters. I remember I was coming down the back stretch of the track and I was watching on the Jumbotron Bekele and Craig Motram, an Australian guy finishing in this kicking duel. And I was like nowhere even close to him. Right. And it was kind of like one of those moments of being like, like, yeah, this isn't, this isn't my best event. Like a moment of realization. So then that openness allowed me to start experimenting with longer stuff. So I went home that summer, started training for some longer distance stuff, did the World 20K Championships, the US National 20K Champs, and it was clicking pretty well. And then I got into marathon training over the win over the, the late fall slash winter. And Houston was just supposed to be like at check in along the way, let's see how this marathon training is going. I was planning on debuting at the Los Angeles Marathon because there weren't a lot of offers out on the table having not really run a lot of longer distance races.

So take me back to this race in Houston because I think I missed somewhere in there that that was actually your first half marathon. Because obviously the result of that race is so out of this world that it's easy to miss that little detail. So it's the beginning of 2007, a year and a half before the Olympics. You're sort of trying to figure out where you belong in this running world. You show up to Houston, it's. And at the time, the American record for a half marathon is an hour and 55 seconds. So tell me what you're thinking at the start line. What are your expectations? What are you there to prove to yourself?

So I had written down on my hands, this was like before the days of GPS watch. That isn't overly cumbersome. You know, they had the big old brick wall ones, but not, like, little nice ones. So I was just using a Timex watch, right? And so I had written down on my hand, like, three different categories of times that I was going for. So, like, one if I was having an A day, and that was like, just under American record pace. 1 if I was having a B day, which was like 61, 30 or something, and one for like a C day, like, 62 flat, right? And like I said, training was just going phenomenal, like, where I was blowing my own mind, but more like, like, it's the feeling like that's what I love the most about athletics and about running and about that day. I describe Houston as being like heaven and hell at the same time. It was heaven because, like, I was floating the whole time. It felt easy the entire way. It was insane. Like, the coolest sensation, one of the coolest bodily sensations I've ever experienced in my life. And if I could go to heaven, experience that feeling of running like that every single day, I would like. It was unreal. But the reason why it was also hell, and it kind of haunted me is especially all throughout my running careers, I can never get back there. So it is my best half marathon by far. I never broke 61 again. And I could never figure out how to go get back to that place.

You went 59, 59, 43, 43. So you obliterate the American record. Like, that's over a minute off the American record record, right?

And so I was running Going back to the story of the race. Like, the first mile, I was just going out and, you know, now we have so much science and technology and heart rate we can go off of. And we're looking at our watch a million times. But again, I'm just looking at like, my normal Timex watch. And so I in what's happening in my mind in that first mile is I'm literally like going into my mind's eye, picturing myself back on Green Church Road in Mammoth where we trained and being like, if I was running a 13 mile threshold, could I maintain this effort that I'm currently at? And the answer was yes. So I was just rolling with it, right? Came through the first miles, like 5:35. I was like, that felt too easy. Like, I wasn't supposed to be running this fast, but that just felt too easy. So let me just like notch it down a little bit more at an effort that I know, again, going back in my mind's eye, I know I can hold this effort to the finish. And next mile is like 5, 4, 32. And then the next mile was like, like 4:28. And I was just like, starting to scare myself a little bit. I was like, okay, like, let's not screw this thing up. Like, obviously you're gonna have a heck of a day today. No one else is around. Like, mebs in the race and all those guys, like, from the very first miles, just me in the roads, right? But it didn't matter. Like, I was so mentally clicked in and like, everything was just firing. Is just like, all how it's supposed to be, right? Like the most magical sensation like, I've ever had had. And so I just kept pushing and just again, like, it's waiting for it to get hard almost. And it never, never did. Like, I had one issue out there around mile nine where my stomach got a little bit turny because over half marathon we're not taking in any fluids. If the weather's right, the cool conditions. And it was a nice, cool, perfect day to run in Houston that day, flat course. And so I wasn't taking in anything. Around mile nine, my stomach got a little bit upset and you know, that passed a couple minutes later. But literally, like, it was. It was easy the entire way. Like, I'm still super curious, you know, if I had pacemakers and if that was a full marathon, what I could have run that day. Because I got myself back in really good shape, but never that kind of shape over half marathon again. And looking back on it, that's why, Like, I'm such a big proponent of speed now, right? It's like I had spent not just the last year focus on 5k development. I had spent my entire running course career, from the time I was 13, for 10 years until I was 23, working on speed, working on 5. And then all of a sudden I piled on marathon training, where I'm hitting longer thresholds, higher volume than I've ever done before, and bang, there it is. And so that's why that 5k speed, like, I can't emphasize it enough with my athletes I'm coaching now. The further away I got from that 5k fitness, the harder the half felt, the harder the marathon felt. But that day in Houston, it was just, just. It's like a warm knife through butter all day long.

When you crossed that finish line, did you feel like I actually could have gone a little bit harder?

Yeah. That's interesting, right? Because I'm talking about how easy it felt yet. Like, I wasn't like leaving anything in the tank necessarily, you know, So I felt like I was running as hard as I ran practice. But I mean, if you watch. Go back and watch like YouTube video, like, I didn't. And that's why, like, when people do, like, Kipchoge breaking too, like, he didn't look crazy tired after that, right? But there's also, you get this huge hit of adrenaline when you come across the line, do something like that. Like, breaking 60 was kind of a lifetime goal for me. And then to go and do it my first marathon and like, Peter, it was crazy too. Like, so my parents were on the lead vehicle, my wife was on the lead vehicle. My agent, my coach, they're all on the lead vehicle. So I'm literally staring at them the entire race. And they're not allowed to cheer or anything. But, you know, like, like any athletic performance that I've done, like, I was just a piece of the puzzle, right? Like, it wasn't all me. Like, my mom, like, she provided the safe place for me, my refuge. Every time I would come back all rattled because I had a bad workout or got hurt or whatever. Like, she was like, she provided that home that provided that refuge. My dad was my coach. My wife was there for me through the depression at Stanford and all the times, all the good, all the bad, you know, and so staring at the people who are your team the entire race was like, hugely, emotionally empowering for me as well, you know? So I'll never forget. I was actually. They get to the finish line, the lead car they kind of zip up the road a little bit. They drop, my parents and Sarah, my wife, like 200 meters before the finish line. And they have to like, they're like running back to try to get to the finish before I get there. So I'm coming down the finishing stretch and I see my mom just like, like booking it, like trying to make it to the finish line before I get there. And I actually passed her. She didn't make it. So, like, if you look closely in some, they might have blurred her out in some of the pictures, but like, she's in the back, like sprinting behind me. But yeah, I'll never forget, like, coming across the finish line, giving my parents a big hug, giving my wife big hug, my coach. And it was kind of this sensation of like, we did this, you know, like, it wasn't so special because I felt like I had done anything incredible, but it was like we all did this thing together and it was just. Just an amazing lifetime moment that I'll never forget.

Now, from a professional standpoint, how much did your life change in that moment? Because that really puts you on the map as America's great hope for the marathon in 2008, right?

Yeah, I mean, it was huge. I went from a guy who was decent on the track, NCAA champ, so I had a little bit of credentials behind me, but I went from that to that put me inside of the top 10 all time performers over half marathon. So it was kind of like all of a sudden this moment of realization of like, oh, dang, like I have a chance at this. Like, I have a chance at meddling in Beijing. Like I. And all. There is also just the excitement of like, I found it. Like I felt like I'd been hitting my head against a wall for so long with the shorter distance stuff just wasn't quite clicking, right? Like, it just wasn't quite me. And. And that day in Houston is like, this is what I was created to do, right? And I think it's. We all have this kind of experience in life where we're kind of searching out, like, what am I here for? Like, why was I created? What is my giftedness? When you find that area where you're like, this is why I'm here. This is what I was made to do. It's kind of that moment of like, whoa, like, this is. This is it. This is my thing, you know, and it did like, create a little bit more of heighten my own expectations, you know, like. Like after that, I never showed up in another race thinking I couldn't win or not having high expectations for the race. So that was maybe a little bit of a harder thing for me to manage. But it was just more than anything, just a cool moment of realizing, now I'm in the club with the best guys in the world.

I think you've said it really well, right? Which is, this was heaven, this was hell. And the hell part of that is something that I've always observed great athletes with just a tincture of sadness, too, because the stage on which you compete is the most brutal stage because it's the one for which you have the shortest half life. So when you say, like, this is what I was meant to do, on the one hand, most of us can not even relate to what you're talking about, right? Like, I can't relate to being the best in the world at anything. I couldn't relate to being the thousandth best person in the world at anything. Anything. Right. Physical, not physical, doesn't matter. But now when you take that thing that is your gift and you acknowledge that, well, actually, it's something that is very fleeting. There's a very narrow window in your life in which you get to be really good at this. And by the way, as a runner, technically, it's a day you're going to have a single best run and you don't necessarily know when it's going to be. You might be very good for a decade, but there's really going to be a time when you look back and say, that was the best I could have ever do. Obviously, for the half marathon, we know when that day was, four years later, it would be your best marathon of all time. But I think for some people, I would imagine at least that makes being a retired athlete or an athlete who's passed his or her prime a very difficult process. Do you talk with your athletes about that? Even though they're on the upswing, right? They're in the part of the, hey, I want to get better, I want to get better. But do you spend any time with them talking about, hey, this, first of all, enjoy this like crazy, because it's going to be gone and it's going to be gone probably by the time you're 30 and you have the rest of your life to not be the best at this thing. And secondly, here's how you can prepare for that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I talk a lot with my wife about that because she's 38, turning 39 in April, and she's actually running the best stuff she's ever Run still. Which is. Is incredible and I think speaks to like, why women age better than men in a lot of ways. But what was really impactful for me at the end of my career was this moment. I was in an airplane. I was looking out over everything and just trying to get clarity about what was going on. Because I just been through four years of massive struggle, right? And what I felt like, I was just kind of like having a little prayer session with God. And what I felt like, what I was sensing is just this reminder that it's not meant to last, last forever. Because I think, like, you're saying, Peter, it's like when you're in it, you feel like it is going to last forever. And it is supposed to last forever. But that's actually though, like, what makes life so beautiful, right, Is that, like, nothing lasts forever, right? That's like, what makes the sunset so beautiful. It doesn't just stay in the sky forever. It's what makes life so special because it's not just going to go on forever. So having that moment of realization that this. It's okay for it to not last forever, it's okay that, like, that was my day and I. I did, I savored it for everything is worth, right? And that's absolutely what I tell my athletes as well. Like, savor every second of it. But life is going to change. You're going to enter into new seasons, and life is beautiful every single day all around you, right? So, like, having this perspective of, like, yes, this is very important. This is what we're going after. But, like, true beauty is around us all the time if we have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear spirit. And so, like, removing ourselves from the performance some ways can be super, super helpful, not only as we transition out of sport, but even when we're in sport. And just being like, this is something that is adding to my life, it is not my life. And, like, I can have this day in Houston, have this very beautiful experience, this very magical day, but I can actually just go for a walk outside my house and look at the trees and look at the sun and the stars and be outside in the moon and get the. The same kind of, like, gratitude for life just by simply entering into nature and being fully present in it, you know? So I've definitely, like, my perspective has changed. I was for a long time just all wrapped into this performance, performance, performance, performance. It's easy to be that way. And I do enjoy going after performances. I love, like, seeing growth, seeing change in the body, seeing adaptation, going after big goals. Like, I love, that's still very much who I am. And I think that's. That's something that helps people transition out of this sport. A lot of people talk about having a sense of identity loss when they stop doing whatever their sport is. But for me, like, I had to figure out, how do I stay true to who I am? Because running was just an expression of who I was, and it was like my painting, right? But now, like, I have to find another mechanism to express who I am. So I'm doing that, like, in the lifting space. And these crazy challenges that I'm doing, I'm still, like, finding a way to express myself. And I think that's what, as humans, like, we want to have that experience, right? Like, we're here for a reason, and we want to express ourself on our canvas, whatever it might be. And when you lose that ability to be able to express yourself, that's when things can get dark pretty quick, right? So, like, for people, for my athletes who are transitioning out of the sports, being like, okay, like, how do you stay true to who you are? Like, I love physical challenge. I love seeing growth, growth. And so I'm going to express it now through lifting, and that's going to come to an end at some point, and then I'm going to find another way to express it. But I think as long as we're continually finding ways to be ourself and to express ourself, we're going to be happy individuals in some ways.

Your experience post this amazing breakthrough in the half marathon is kind of paralleled in a way with what happened in 2011. Right? So you go into Beijing in 08 in some ways with the expectation of the running world on your shoulders, like, you're going to medal in the marathon. Your trajectory has been unbelievable. We talked about that race. 10th place finish, still very impressive, especially the way in which you did it, where you went out a little tentative and then had to kind of try to reel people back and go from 60th to 10th. Now let's fast forward. It's 2011. How were you feeling going into the Boston Marathon that year? Was there. What was it about your training that led you into that race? So poised to do so well?

Yeah, so I had a big transition. So I was trained up in mammoth and in 2010, left the mammoth Track Club. And again, like, a big part was like, my faith was inspiring, that decision. Like, I've always just been a super spiritual person, have a ton of respect from people of every faith, tradition and background, you know, but for my own journey, like, I just love that part of life, that spiritual dimension, you know. And I was just really desperate to experience God in some way. Right. So decided to leave the Mammoth track Club, essentially like have God as my coach. But really that just looked like like me spending a lot of time in prayer trying to connect with God. And again, that's where I got this kind of like revelation. It's not about what I do, it's about how I do what I do. Like that came from that season. So I kind of went through this season and then I was kind of experimenting with some new styles of training that I'd never done before. And again like new stimulus always is helpful for the body. So I'd been kind of in the same routine, doing the same structured training.

Tell me a little bit about that. Because one of the things my wife actually insisted on today and I'm not doing a good job of it though I promise I will, is my wife's a runner and she really wants to know every detail about your training. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about it here in the pre transition. So I. E. In the 2010 mammoth days, what's your volume? How did you warm up? How much body work were you doing? What kind of stretching, all that sort of stuff. Like what were the tempo runs like? And then I'm curious to hear what that looked like when you basically became self coached post that departure.

Yeah, so it's pretty simple. You know, it's like just to lay out like a quick sample week. Like every Tuesday I'm doing interval sessions where you're working on that kind of like 5k specific kind of speed, things like 6 by mile, 10 by k, say 800 meter repeats, 400 meter repeats. I've kind of since like gravitated more towards shorter distance repeats. Four hundreds, two hundreds, things like that. I think that's way more important for marathoners because you kind of want a lot of differential between how fast those Tuesday intervals are compared to your like Thursday or Friday threshold.

So prior to your departure when they were 1 mile repeats and 1k repeats, let's say the main set was 10 by a kilometer or 6 by a mile. That's the main set. What's the warmup when you arrive at the track, what's the first thing you do?

So we do like 20 minute easy jog and then we'd come back, do some like dynamic flexibility or maybe some static stuff, but not a lot of static stretching going on. Stretching has not been a huge part of like my, my running. All you actually want some tension in your legs. Think about it like your muscles being springs. Like if there's some tension, a tightly wound spring is going to respond to the ground corners quicker. Right. Compared to like a slinky that's super slow. So you actually want a certain amount of tension, healthy tension. You want full range of motion. But so we're doing a lots of like mobility work to get that full range, but keeping some tension in the leg so not a lot of static stuff.

And that 20 minute jog for you is what pace? That's like eight minute mile. I mean how slow?

Yeah, yep. Kind of like that 8 minute mile pace kind of range. Kind of just like let your body do what it wants to do, but no effort. Right. You're not breathing hard, you're conversational the whole time. Get back. You do that dynamic flexibility and stuff. Go into some drills and strides. And I have videos of all this on my YouTube channel, run free training YouTube channel, if people are curious to check it out. But drills and strides before maybe like it takes like 5, 10 minutes to do that. The strides are maybe like 6 times 100 meters, something like that. And then change shoes into your racing shoes and then straight into the workout.

And then you would do, let's say it's a six by a mile. How fast would you run that mile? So if you're your, your half marathon pace would be a 4:32 ish. Your marathon pace would be a 4:42 to 4:45. How much faster do you need to run that mile?

So yeah, if we were doing it up at altitude, I would typically be running right around that kind of 4:30 pace at 7,000ft. So if you're down at sea level, that's kind of equivalent to like 4 20ish, maybe a tad bit under. So the 6 by a mile and the the k's, that's more of like 10k specific workout. But again I'd kind of gravitate more towards like 5k specific stuff. A little bit quicker and how much.

Rest in between each set.

With the miles we'd keep it fairly tight, like 90 seconds to two minutes. Again, kind of depends. When you're at altitude you take a little bit more rest. But it's crazy like you know, as you get fit, like you recover super fast and the intensity, you know, it's like we're not doing like max sprints where those guys gotta take like 10 minutes between sprints right. Like we're very much like when you're doing that 10k range, ideally you're running an effort. You should be able to hold for 10k and you're stopping at a mile so you're not like killing it. So anywhere between 90 seconds and two minutes on the rest.

And are you walking during the 90 second recovery or standing still?

Sometimes we're like walk jogging, just like slow walk jog. Kind of depends. Like I like doing in and out kind of intervals too. That was like one of Prefontaine's workouts where you do like 200 meters fast, 200 meters, kind of moderate. So the moderate part would be at least like 8 minute pace or even faster, like, like 7 minute pace. And then the fast part is that like goal 5k pace or slightly slower than mile pace even. So there's a lot of different ways, variations that we take on those workouts.

And what would be the cool down at the end of that main set.

And then a 20 minute cooldown and then the whole day, you know, we're just resting, doing some mobility work, eating, ice bathing, which, you know, it's funny, like the, the science on the ice bath has changed quite a bit. Like we would go, go from these workouts and long runs straight to a creek, straight into cold water. Whereas, you know, the science is now showing you want your body to respond to the inflammation first. So that's more what we do. Now where we wouldn't do an ice bath, we don't do a ton of ice baths in general, but there's a whole bunch of other good positive effects of ice bathing, like dopamine going up tenfold and all this stuff.

Right, right. That's gonna have some antidepressant effects. And would you be doing two workouts on that day or what? One.

So then we'll come back in the afternoon, just like a 30, 35 minute easy run, and then go straight to the weight room and then do our leg lifting. So that's, that's a mistake I see a lot of runners make is you want all your leg stressors to be on the same day and it's not what you feel like doing. Like you don't feel like doing weights after doing a hard run. You do the hard run first and then ideally you come back in the afternoon. You could do it right after the hard run, but you probably won't get quite as much out of it because you're bringing fatigue into the lifting. If you space it out a little bit more, you usually feel Better during the lifting. So yeah, we do our hard leg session in the afternoon and then head home, eat early to bed. I always describe my life was more of a professional sleeper than a professional running. Like, honestly, I was just sleeping all the time. I would book out every single day from 1 to 3pm would be my business meeting. And so no calls, nothing scheduled during that time. And those just two hour naps every single day.

So what were you sleeping like 10 hours a day between the nap and night?

Yeah, yeah, probably right around there. I'm like, I'm probably in bed for nine to 10 hours every night, but there'd also be some restlessness from the hard training and, and honestly, maybe even from sleeping too much. You know, I wasn't very sleep deprived, so sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night, be starving, go get some a snack, get back in bed, lay there and awake for an hour or two and then fall back, back asleep. But just, you want. It's like, like the Kenyans, the Ethiopians, they spend a ton of time off their feet as well, right? So it's like when you're not training, you're trying to not be doing anything. So we're like runners, pro runners are very lazy people. Like from day to day. Like we don't go for walks or hikes or do anything. It's just train, eat, sleep, stay off your feet. And you're always aware of that energy expenditure. You're trying to save as much as you can for your training.

I remember in high school I grew up in Canada and so we had a lot of really amazing Jamaican runners. Of course they were sprinters and they used to just tease each other so much because they'd be like, look, we are the laziest people you will ever meet. And if you want to make us run faster, just put a couch at the finish line. Like whoever can get to the finish line first gets to lay on that couch. But it was really work hard, play hard, right? It was really super intense workouts these guys would do and then as much nothing as possible to really conserve energy. Now, as you probably know, cyclists have to work very hard deliberately to calorie restrict and often they show up to major tour events, right? So not the one day classic stuff, but when you're thinking about the Tour de France, the Giro, the Vuelta, these sort of huge stage races, they're very depleted, they're trying to be as light as possible. Everything comes down to this one single metric that I think running doesn't quite have. But in cycling, you have this thing called watts per kilo. Everything is watts per kilo. If you lined up all the cyclists at the beginning of the Tour de France and you could know what everybody's threshold was in watts per kilo, that would predict the order they would finish, barring a strategic mishap or an injury or an accident. How deliberately were you watching your weight during this period of time? Or were you basically just saying, I could eat as much as I wanted and, and my weight would basically float to a level that I was happy with?

Yeah, no, I mean, I was very specific with it. And preface all this with just saying, like, it's not the most healthy lifestyle. Doing what I was doing. Training at the level I was doing wasn't optimal for my health. Like, my testosterone was clinically low every single time I tested it.

How low?

In the hundreds. Like 150, something like that.

Oh, so you had the testosterone of a woman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is really interesting. Like, how do you run so fast with such low testosterone? I don't understand that.

When I finished residency, my testosterone was in the 220s, so it was probably in the low 200s throughout all of residency and not because of training, just because of sleep deprivation and a whole bunch of other factors. But wow. I. 1/ hundreds is staggeringly low.

Yeah. And it would, it would kind of come back up when I take these two week breaks. Right. So going back to the weight thing I would take, I'd get down to ideally a race. I raced my best at 137. I got, I'm 5 foot 10. I got down as low as 1 27, but I wasn't. If, if I was less than 137, I was getting worse. Which is really interesting. Cause I was on Lance's podcast and we were chatting about this and he said he didn't ever feel like he could get too light, whereas I was much the opposite. If I was under 137, it was, it was not good for me at all.

Well, Lance was a really big cyclist for his type of racing. I mean, Lance's race weight was like 160 to 160, 65. Which for a guy who's 5 foot 9, 5 foot 10, that's quite a lot of weight for a guy who is such a good climber. And I think today we see guys being quite a bit lighter in that group. Like, I think a GC contender today is, God, probably like 140 pounds, 59140 would be a great cyclist build. So if you're optimal. Which by the way, 137, that still strikes me as crazy light. But if you're 137, were you managing up to that weight or down to that weight?

Down to that weight. So yeah, I take these two week breaks where I wouldn't run at all. And literally it was like donut eating competition for two weeks straight. So I'd literally put on like over 10 pounds in that two week period. And I hated myself for doing that. Like it wasn't good for me emotionally or mentally, but it worked every single time for my buildup. So again, I'm not saying like athletes should do this right. But my problem was I was getting so lean and so light, I, I should have taken a more healthy approach to putting on weight, to being good to my body, shifting my macros around during that time off and doing a healthy way, not with a bunch of crap like I was doing, but I'd put on those £10, £12, get up to like 1 50ish, and then it'd be like a six month gradual reduction in body weight to where I'd get to that 137 just like a couple weeks, weeks before my competition. And then I was, I was good to go. But also too like, I think it's highly specific for athletes. So like I said, I'm in the middle of five kids, my brothers who aren't athletic like walk around at like 165 to 170. So that's probably where my natural body weight should be, somewhere right in that range. And so I was trying to get down to weights that were pretty far from my normal. Right. So and that's why it was like pretty unhealthy for me to be and why I couldn't, couldn't stay down in those 137s, 140s for very long because I would just get super, super run down. My motivation would go down, my training would go to crap. So again, if someone is more naturally made to be a marathoner, smaller frame sits already like their normal body weight would be like my wife Sarah, like she sits around like 110ish year round. But even if she wasn't running, she'd probably be about the same weight. So she can sit at that weight year round no problem. Whereas for me like, like it's not healthy for me to be down at 137. So I have to come back out of it. So that's where it's really important for people just know their body and where it should naturally be and then realizing, okay, if you're going to manipulate it down to a range where you're the fastest and the lightest at, you got to come back out of that as well.

Yeah, my wife's the same way. Sure. Her walk around weight is 110, 111 and she has to work to maintain that weight as opposed to do anything else. And I think that's probably why she's just a good runner is. It's just she's naturally so light that it comes to her easily in that regard. So tell me, what volume, what was your weekly mileage when you were still training with Mammoth?

So it was probably, you know, again, this was like pre Garmin days. It's probably around like 110 or so. I thought it was more than that. But then we got Garmins and started measuring a lot of the loops we were doing for our easy running. We're like, oh, these aren't nearly, they're like a mile shorter than we thought. So it's probably a little bit less than I thought. But those easy days are just chill. And I think this is the other mistake that a lot of runners make is they're just kind of running the same all the time. And that will get you to a certain level. Right. Like there's a place for that. But if you really want to see how good you can get, you got to like have your hard day super hard and your easy days super chill. So like oftentimes, like, you know, like I said, I'm running 12 miles under 5 minute pace pace. And then the next day I'm coming back and running like 8:30 pace for an easy run. Just super, super chill and slow. So having that kind of variance between pacing I think is super important. I mean it's, it's not really rocket science. Right? It's like you stress the body, you rest the body, it adapts and then you keep repeating the cycle over and over again.

It's not rocket science. But if there's one thing that I spend a lot of time talking about with my patients when it comes to this particular aspect of training, it. And again, this isn't to train them to become competitive athletes, but it's important from a physiologic standpoint, as we think about longevity, it's most people are training in this garbage zone where it's too high an intensity to build a true aerobic foundation and too low an intensity to truly stress the body glycolytically. So we talk about it in Zones, Right. So we think zone two is how we describe it and we define it by lactate metabolism. So zone two is that all day pace, lactate has to be below 2 millimolar. This is a pace you should be able to hold all day from a metabolic standpoint. You probably can't hold it all day from a muscular and structural standpoint, but metabolically you should be able to hold this pace all day and that's easier than people are used to training. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there's like gotta be this real push pace. Kind of your four by four pace. Right? Right. Four on, all out, four off. And most people aren't used to that level of discomfort. So they're kind of in this no man's land. So they're suffering two problems. One, they're in a physiologic no man's land, and two, there's no variability to it anyway. So even though you say it's obvious, I think it's important for people to hear this discussion because I don't think enough people understand, both for performance and also longevity, why you have to be at the more extremes of kind of zone two. Zone five is where the progress comes.

One kind of like easy way to help manipulate this system a little bit is if you're a coffee drinker and you talked a little bit about caffeine, but we'd only have caffeine before our hard days. And then so the easy day, like you feel like death, like you're tired from the workout, but also because you don't have caffeine on board and you, you're just kind of forced to take it really slow. Like you don't feel like you could run fast if your life depended on it. So if you're trying to, like, a lot of the clients we're working with run free, it's like not reasonable for them to not have any caffeine on the day. But we're like, let's at least manipulate it so you're having it more so before the hard workouts and then a lot less on the easy days.

And there are some athletes I'm sure you've seen that don't really get a benefit from caffeine. Like I never got a benefit from caffeine. And to this day, like I can drink coffee at any time of day, has no bearing on my sleep. So I get no up from it, I get no down from it. I just, I could drink three coffees a day for a month and then stop experience no headaches, no withdrawal, not even notice it.

That's interesting.

And there are different genes that are responsible for caffeine metabolism, so people do sort of vary in that. But I've always been incredibly envious of the people who are very sensitive to caffeine because it's an awesome tool to have in your toolkit. It for just this purpose, but also just for wakefulness and overcoming jet lag and travel and stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah. When used correctly, it can be super helpful. Of course, like when abused and if you're sensitive to it and you're drinking it later in the day and it screws up your sleep, then it stops being helpful. But yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's like, like I was saying, everyone's an experiment of one. Right. So that's why you gotta just play with stuff till you find what works for you.

So once you became self coach, how did the workouts change? What did you do leading up to 2011 Boston in terms of volume, intensity and everything else?

One of the big adjustments I made, I started spacing things out. So I don't think I finished the week. So we had the intervals on Tuesday, you know, and then like a long threshold on Friday. So you get two easy days before that. So you're feeling a little bit better for that threshold.

And tell me about the threshold. Threshold is a constant. It's like a simulated slightly higher than race pace, shorter distance.

Yeah. And it gets more towards race pace as it gets longer. So we'd grow those out. You're starting out at maybe like five or six miles and then you get to where you're doing 15 miles straight without stopping. And I'll do three of those every single 12 week. Build up for a marathon, which that would be a very typical build up for Marathon about 12 weeks and make sure I get three of those long thresholds in. And those were my biggest indicator workouts. It's kind of like whatever I knew I could hold for 15 miles in training in the context of hard training. Right. So it's not like you don't fully taper for this workout and just bang the heck out of it and be like, oh, I can run this for a marathon. It's like, no, your legs like need to be a little bit fatigued. You need to be in the middle of hard training. But then generally speaking, whatever you can run for that 15 mile threshold, you can hold for a marathon, which is also kind of like mind blowing and hard for first time marathoners to believe that you're like, how do I go 11 more miles at this pace? But, but that's the magic of tapering the energy out on the course, the carb loading, all that stuff. Your body finds a way to be able to hold that through. So that 15 mile threshold, or that threshold of varying distances on Friday and then Sunday coming back with a long run. So again, you're doing that long run with a little bit of fatigue in your, in your legs. That'd be anywhere from an hour 45 to two and a half hours. But during that time we're, and we would go off time, not distance, but we're covering. Sometimes I'd be running over the marathon distance for two and a half hours. Right. So those are, those are high quality efforts. Oftentimes it's kind of like medium pace. So say maybe six minute pace for the first half of that and then the second half of that, we're doing like fartlek style running where you're practicing, changing gears on tired legs and just hitting that aerobic end a little bit harder towards the end of it. But a lot of it is just like mentally learning, like how do I turn my legs on when I feel really dead? When I'm 25 miles into this race, how do I, what cues can I go to to turn things on and to change gears here? Because it's, it doesn't matter if you're running 6 minute pace or 8 minute pace, when you get 20 miles into your run, you feel tired. Right. And so you gotta just learn like, okay, what mental cues can I pull on here to turn everything on?

But everything you just described was how you were doing it before 2011.

Yep.

And then how did you tweak that formula?

So I started spacing things out a little bit more. I started just taking two easy days between every session. So I was focusing on like a nine, ten day cycle. But then I was making those workouts higher quality, bigger. So like one workout that I implemented instead of saying like those Tuesday short sessions, which just might been a little bit, again, I think I got too far away from 5k fitness. I should have spent more time developing that. But, but this workout I absolutely love for marathoning where I do 20 by a thousand meters with 200 meter easy jog between each thousand meter, and that was done faster than marathon pace. So the goal is to like drive your threshold down. So you spend all this time doing threshold running at a certain pace and then you're going just a tad bit quicker than that for these broken up thresholds.

So how Much quicker. So if your marathon target pace for a K is what is two, just under three minutes or just over three minutes?

Three minutes is a 2:06 and change 2 hours and 30 seconds marathon. So yeah, so like maybe I'll be shooting for like 2:55, like 5 seconds per k quicker kind of feel. Yeah.

How many days? Let's just assume we're talking about it as a week. Even though it's a nine day cycle, how many weeks would you succeed on that day where you would actually go 255 or better for each of the 20k versus fail somewhere along the way?

Actually I think I was pretty successful most days. Right. But I think a lot of that is because I wasn't trying to bite off more than I can chew, right. Trying to hit home runs and workouts like they were workouts where I was kind of set up to see success. And often too, like my thresholds would just get better every time I would attempt it. Right. As the buildup is going, I'm getting stronger, I'm getting in better shape. I'm also getting lighter, which is making things a little bit easier. And so usually I've seen pretty good progress from that 12 week buildup where I'm getting pretty. What would happen though, more likely than not, in almost every single buildup I have is you get little niggles, right? Where get little like foot pain, little knee pain, just little things that pop up. So if I missed a workout is usually more for that reason. And then that's when you got to like go to the cross training, which is an area I've also like learned in and grown so much in and utilize a lot more now as a coach than when I was running. But when I was a runner I was just kind of like the old school like, like run or die kind of mentality, which is not, not a helpful mentality to have.

So what did you expect to happen on that April day in 2011?

So I was coming off a terrible half marathon. So a month before that race I ran. I don't even, I couldn't even tell you my time. I don't think I ever looked it up. It was like 66 minutes or something for half marathon, which is, you know, seven minutes off my personal best. And training had been going super well. Things have been clicking well. I thought I was in really good shape. It's kind of one of those scenarios where you go to the start with this really high expectation, but then it's easy to have that like shattered, you know, and so Things just weren't clicking in the race. Created negative mindset, negative snowball, excitement gone, and then you're just trying to get to the finish line, you know, so not a good run at all. Super been out of shape afterwards because I didn't know why.

How long was that before the Boston Marathon?

A month out. Yeah. That's one that you want to go well to create confidence. Right. And I didn't know why it went so bad. Nothing I could put my finger on. So those are the hardest ones to manage mentally. Right. But, you know, I got back up and just started training again. And I found this over and over again, not just with myself, but with athletes like Coach. Oftentimes, like these races when you're in heavy marathon training won't go well, but then they'll turn something on inside of you. It's like, neurologically, all of a sudden you're like, firing. And so I came out of that race and just started feeling phenomenal, like. Like similar to how I felt before Houston. And it was a very, like, quick change. It was like the next week, all of a sudden I was like, like, like I said, training been going well before, but it got taken even to the next level. And there's all these different factors going into why that might have been. I think the race helped also. We headed back to Stanford to train at sea level. And so that it was very much how we'd utilize altitude pre kids. We have kids now, so we can't do this, but we had spend, like, two months up at altitude, drop down to sea level for a month, go back up, drop back down. And that was taken from Jack Daniels, who's done. Done a ton, a ton of research in the running space. I think probably one of the most brilliant minds in running, in my opinion, especially from a scientific perspective. And I was asking him, corresponding with him, and like, hey, what's the best way to utilize altitude? And that's what he recommended. He's like, go up to altitude, shoot back down. Because what you see is you see a big, dramatic increase in your hematocrit hemoglobin early on in those first three weeks, and then it just starts to taper off, right? And so then you. Then you head back down to sea level, and it's going to go back down. But then you see when you come back up to altitude again, another big dramatic shift. So you just always want that shifting up, right? So that's what we were doing. We headed back down to sea level. And again, there's positives to Training at sea level, like I'm sleeping way better when I'm at sea level. I'm running faster, able to do workouts I can't do at altitude. And so things just started clicking like crazy. I also started having caffeine every single day. And that was the first time in my career I started doing that, this. And so I started running my easy runs a lot quicker. And I have no idea if this like was something that was. Obviously it worked, but I don't know if it was be in despite of this or because of this, you know, but I was running a lot of my easy runs at like 5:30, 5, 20 pace and just like floating through it. Just feeling even like the day before the race, do an easy 30 minute run plus like six by a hundred meter strides. That's kind of a custom run for us before the Maryland on. I'm so glad Sarah wasn't there, my wife, because she would have killed me for running as fast as I did. I was by myself and I was just hammering. I was running like 5:30 pace, but it was just easy. I was just floating, wasn't even breathing.

What would be the difference in your hematocrit? How much would your hematocrit vary between sea level and elevation?

That's a good question. You know, I don't remember off the top of my head. We weren't super great about doing blood work. I wish we had done more of that. We would do it just kind of like it seemed like random times, you know, we pop down the Olympic training center, get some blood work done and see where it was at. But to be honest, I, I can't remember the differences, but it would come up pretty significantly in those first three weeks for sure. So yeah, just feeling like a million bucks heading into that race. But I did have this like kind of thing hovering over me of like you just tanked a half marathon kind of thing. Then the day before the race, I remember talking to the race one of the race organizers and she's telling me like, you know, like we're supposed to get a really good tailwind tomorrow. Right, right. And I was just. When I heard that, I just lit up inside because I, I get excited about running fast. Like I'd rather break a world record than win a gold medal. Like that's just how I am, you know. And I remember talking to Bill Rogers who won the Boston Marathon four times, won New York four times, and he was telling me, he's like, he's like, you know, about once every 10 years you get a wicked tailwind in Boston, then you can really roll. So he had a year when he got a tailwind. He said stopped four times in the race to, like, tie his shoe, to walk, to get water, and he still ran 209. And so I. His words were in my head. And standing on the starting line in Hopkinton that morning, and I'm looking at the flag and it's just going the exact direction we're going to run, I was like, I'm never, never going to get a day like this again. Like, I'm make the most of it. And I always like to go to the front and lead. Like, that was kind of my signature. But I didn't let one moment go by in that race where I wasn't pressing. I was like, I'm going to get everything I can out of single mile. And so we were rolling. We were like a lot of our miles in the 4:30s during that race. We came through the half in 61, 52, I believe, was our split. The race organizer was on a motorcycle in front of us, and he saw our split at halfway, saw the clock. And he's like. He radioed his clock, guys. He's like, hey, you guys messed up the clocks. It says 6150. They're like, yeah, that's right. So we were. I mean, at the time, the world record record, I believe, was like, low 204. And so we're, you know, under world record pace. And again, like, the first half of the Boston Marathon is slightly down, so. And we had the wind at our backs.

And you have Heartbreak Hill at the very end as well.

Yeah, you have Heartbreak Hill, like, all through 17 and a half miles till 20. It's like up and down hills. So it's. It's typically known as a challenging, slow course. But again, if you get the right wind and you make the most of it, because these aren't pace races either. Like most fast races races, you have pacemakers in there, and they're in charge of pace. Guys are just tucked in for most. First 20 miles, at least, and then they're off and running the last 10k. Well, in this race, there's just me at the front just hammering and all of Africa sitting on my back behind me, enjoying the ride. But I didn't care. I was like, I'm gonna make the most of today. I remember one. One memory from that race was one of the guys on the side of the road, like, some of the spots, like, especially early on in Hopkinton, you're just going through neighborhoods and stuff people out in their launches, chairs. And one of the guys yelling. He's like, hey, Ryan, don't let him steal your tailwind. And I was thinking about that for a while. I was like, is that possible? I don't think so, but lots of kind of funny, funny memories from that. And it was just cool to like, be with those guys, be in the lead group and. And also to get to push them along to something that would have. It was a super historic day, you know, like, the top two guys went on to run 203 low. Like, I think 203.04or something like that, which was, well, like, almost a minute under the world record at the time. And, you know, I finished fourth and ran 204. 58. But I'll never forget. Another memorable part of the race was coming through with a mile to go and seeing they have a clock at a mile to go. And it was right at two hours, right? But I'm in the, like, serious pain cave, right? I went out super fast, super late in the race. No one's around me, and I'm just, like, holding on for deer, like, life. And I was like, I saw two hours flat, and I was like, okay, like, If I break five minutes for this last mile, like, I'm be under 205. My PR at the time was 206:17, so I was already gonna. I was gonna run a big PR no matter what. I was like, 205. That's insane. That sounds pretty good, you know, and there's a part of me that is like, just enjoy this last mile. Run, like, 5:30. Just soak it all in and just enjoy it. But then there was a part of me is like, you know what? You might never be here again. Like, why don't you just put your head down, grit your teeth and bear it, try to break five and get under 205. And so that's what I did. And it was a world of pain. That last mile was a blur. The crowds in Boston are just insane, though. Like, I'll never forget running down Boylston street and just the crowds just going crazy. And, you know, I was in fourth place, but I didn't even care because, like, to me, performance shifted away from, like, beating other people to me maximizing my own potential. And that's what I get most excited about. And it's like that with my lifting, too. It's like, there's guys deadlifting well over double what I'm able to do, right? But to Me, like, that's not important. It's about like, me optimizing what I've been given my gift. And also just seeing the fun part of the. Seeing the growth and the improvement. Right. So coming across the finish line, I just like put my hands out and just soaked it all in. Yelled super loud. My wife was there at the finish to give me a big hug and it was, it was super special. I felt like I'd won the race even though I hadn't. But one of those moments where it's like, this is again, like Houston, like one of those magical days that you may never get again. So just soak it all in and enjoy it. But yeah, special day.

To me, the most amazing part of your journey is not the successes, it's the way in which you've been able to kind of carry yourself through the failures. Right. And I think you got this parallel between 07 and 08, right. And then we see it again now here in 11 and 12. So how are you feeling going into London again? I think the expectations early in that season are very high, right?

Yeah. Coming out of a 204, I was, you know, I was like, I'm going to take a shot at winning this race, even though, you know, I'd just been beaten by a minute by those guys. So I knew, I knew it wasn't, you know, like I was expected to necessarily win, but I knew I had a shot. Like, you know, if you run two or four for the marathon in those days, like, you have a chance to win a gold medal. So. And again, I. This was a theme going back to Beijing, talking about not putting on the weight. After I ran London, leading up to the build up for Beijing and how that made my training flat, I did the same thing. And this is one of those things where it's like, okay, like having a coach is a helpful thing. Because if a coach, if I would have told a coach what I was going to do, he'd been like, that's a really bad idea. Let's just stick with what we know works for you in this situation. And that's putting on £10. Pounds. But instead of doing that again, my heart was good, my intentions were good. I was like, okay, like, again, like, faith's a big part of who I am. I really want to hear God. And a way that people use across all traditions to do this is through fasting. Right. So I, instead of putting on ten pounds, I did a one week fast.

How close to the Olympics?

So let's see, Boston was April 15 and the Olympics were August. So you know, it was enough time to where I was going to get a full build up for the, for the game. So I had plenty of time to like put on weight and do my usual thing. But again, I just wanted, I wanted clarity on how to train for this thing. And so instead of my weight going from 137 to 150 during that two week period, it went from 137 to like 130 flat. And that was just. I started the training in a really depleted state. My body wasn't in a good state. I was mentally and spiritually, I was in the best spot I'd ever been, but my body wasn't ready to go at all. It was, was, it was needing a break after that, you know. But I began my training and came back and I was running pretty well initially and then it just kind of went downhill from there and it actually kind of became a miracle that I even made it to the starting line considering how poorly my training was going. Just nothing was working. And this is what I tell myself in the weight room now all the time, where I'm getting stale and training and not seeing growth. If I'm not eating enough food, if I'm not taking enough calories, it doesn't matter how I'm training, it's not going to work. And that's, that's how it was for me in that buildup is like my body was depleted, I didn't have enough calories on board. So it didn't matter how I trained, it wasn't going to work. So just a frustrating period of training leading up to that. Actually had to take my watch off for all my workouts because it was so discouraging to see what my workouts were and see how slow I was running them compared to what I was accustomed to. So that was good for my mental health. And I think there is a point, point that can be helpful for people out there sometimes. Just get away from the data, take all that stuff off and just go off feel. And that was helpful, but it wasn't enough to get my body back into the state it needed to be in.

What did you feel at the start line in London? Was there any hope in you at that point or were you like, look, I'm here at this point out of an obligation to my country. I'm representing my country, I'm wearing the flag of my country. But this is going to be the most difficult two hours of my life.

Life. Yeah. You know, there's, I'm very optimistic person. So I'm pretty good at generating hope. So. And it did help not timing my workouts, so there was a little bit of mystery of thinking, oh, maybe I'm actually in a lot better shape than I think and feel here, you know? So there was some genuine hope on the starting line that. Hey. And that's the thing with running that I've experienced. Sometimes, like, training can go really bad, and you can just pop one, have a big day. So there's always that kind of thought in my head of, like. Like, let's not think that something special couldn't happen today. Cause it could. But it became obvious, like, really early on in the race. The pace felt super hard, super fast. And then, as is the case, oftentimes when I get too lean and too light, I have all these injury issues, right? So, like, I had all this hip stuff going on before the race. Luckily, like, my Cairo guy, John Ball, is amazing. Had me in one piece on the starting line. But then very early on in the race, it was like. Then my right hamstring started hurting, and that's ultimately what led me to drop out. As I was in the middle of that race, I was already starting to limp a little bit. It wasn't even the middle. It was early on. It was like, seven miles into the race, and I was limping. I was like, all right, like, what do I do here? What's the right call? You're trying to kind of coach yourself through it, not give up hope. But then at the same time, you want to be smart. This is my livelihood, you know, And I'm looking out for the long term. And I was like, if. If I'll. I'm willing to be that guy who, like, comes limping in, like, seven hours after everyone, again, gets the. The cheers and inspires people for just hanging in there. But at the same time, like, I also want to be good to my body, you know? And I've been not good to my body a lot. And that was just kind of like a moment where I had a sense of clarity that I needed to be good to myself and call it a day. So that was actually the first race I ever dropped out of in my life, was the London Marathon. And it felt so surreal. I remember stepping on off the. Because it's a loop course, you know, as you're going past the finish and the start a number of times. And I think it was the second loop. I could be wrong on that, but I think it was the second loop when I dropped out and I remember stepping off and I almost started running again because it just felt so wrong. It felt so weird. It felt like I was in someone else's movie or something. But then ultimately I just, you know, walked off the course. And then it began the long process of. Of working through that mentally and emotionally. And know.

What was that like?

Well, it started with Cinnabon. Funny, funny thing. So the next day I'm like, touring around with my family in London, and Sarah knows, like, how I tend to go to food when I get emotionally low.

You know, I can relate.

Yeah. So we pop out of the subway onto the streets, and it's like. It's like Cinnabon is like heaven. It's like, right. My eyesight's just like Cinnabon. And she sees me, like, look at it. She looks at me and she knows exactly where I'm going. You know, she's like, don't do it, don't do it. But of course, I went to Cinnabon, got a big old cinnamon roll. Now I'm sitting out on the curb just eating it. And I look up and like, someone's like, taking a picture of me eating my Cinnabon. And I was like. I felt like I was gonna be on like, Esquire magazine or something. No, actually, I've learned to pick myself up so many times, I've gotten a lot better at it. And for me, it's kind of like I need this period of just being sad and just let myself be sad for however long that takes. The period of kind of like mourning the loss, you know, because this was a big goal for me. And then for me, the next step then is like, okay, restore hope. So what is the next thing I'm going after? Find that target, put it on the calendar. That begins to restore my hope. And then, like, I have a little meeting with myself of things. I'm going to tweak, tweak, do differently, do better. So that also gives me just way more hope that I'm not just going to repeat the same experiment I just did, right? So, like, I'm doing this right now with myself. I'm going back after this sub 5 minute mile and sub 5 deadlift. I'm like, I'm a tweak this, this and this. And like, I really believe it's going to work this time. Right? And so you gotta, you gotta. That's the starting ground. You have to believe that your training is gonna work. That's why it's so important for athletes to believe in their coach. Like, if you don't think it's gonna work, work. It doesn't matter what it's prescribed, it's probably not going to work, right? So that, that belief is so, so important. So, you know, I picked myself up and got going again. But then the problem was and is common the case with runners is then you have all these compensation issues, right? So I had that issue in my upper high hamstring where it attaches there, and then just ran through that. And that started, by the way, because I had plantar fasciitis training for the 20002012 Olympic trials. I got that right before the trials, had no choice, had to run through it. And then that persisted for like eight months. And so low compensation. Get an injury on the other side and upper hamstring in the Games. Then I tore my left quad building up for New York. I tore my right quad building up for Boston. Then I got a sacral stress fracture on my left side. After that, training for my next marathon, it was literally marathon after marathon. I'd sign up for it, it get the deal all worked out, not be able to do it because I'd get some huge injury that would put me out for a long time. And I didn't have a lot of injuries leading up to that. I always considered myself to be super durable. And yeah, so there's just injury after injury and that's kind of that four year wild ride of trying everything I could think to try and ultimately nothing was working. But, you know, as I look back at it now, I really think a big piece of it was the nutrition piece piece. And I started to be in a better mental health point to where like, I didn't have to use food as like a binging mechanism for after these bad races. But that actually I still needed to put on the weight though, right? I still needed to get my body in a good spot. And I wasn't doing that because I didn't need to do it from an emotional mental standpoint. But then that was also killing me at the same time, physically speaking. Right. So looking back, I would say that was a big, big part of why I had so many struggles from 2012 up until my retirement in 2016. And if I could go back and do it differently, I'd actually do something like my mom always wanted me to do and I never wanted to. And that is to. She's like, you should just take like three months completely off and like not run at all. And I was like, you crazy? Like, I'm never gonna do that, you know, but that actually would have been super helpful. Just get away from it, get my body back in a completely different good spot. And now, you know, like, I feel so much better in my current lifestyle. Focused on the lifting, doing very minimal on the endurance end and even like my testosterone. I just got a testosterone blood test result recently and it came back at a thousand. And like, I didn't even think that was possible for me. But again, the lifestyle shift, lifting heavy, eating more calories, just having my body in a better state, sleeping a ton of is just allowed me to kind of like restore myself. And that was exactly what my body was telling me. It was like I've, I felt like my body was saying to me, I've given so much to you over the last 20 years. Like you've pounded me into the ground with 100 mile weeks. After a hundred mile weeks, now it's time to get back to me. And so that's ultimately like why I got into the lifting. I was like, I want to get back to my body, I want to build it back up, I want to make it strong. And there's this thing of like, okay, like I did something I was genetically gifted at. Now let me see what I can do. Take something where I'm not genetically gifted at all. The opposite of that. And again, I just love like the challenge. I love lifting hard. So every single day I'm in the weight room, I go to failure. And I know that's not recommended, but that's just who I am. That's what I love to do. So that's, that's what I do, you know. So I feel like in a really good spot now. But I'm curious, like, if I would have allowed myself to get into a similar state as I'm now, and then went back to the running, how that could have went. But the ship has definitely sailed on that, you know, walking around at £185 now or even like I'll go for runs. And it feels like a completely different sport at this body weight compared to, you know, 137 pounds.

Yeah, and it's even different from cycling. I mean, both sports punish you for the weight, but one of them, you feel it much more than the other. I mean, in running, it changes your gait. I mean, my wife, even though she weighs exactly what she weighs before having kids, she's tried to explain to me that the shape of her pelvis has changed since having three kids. And she said she has ever since having the, especially the boys because they were so big. She's like, I've never felt the same running again. She still weighed thin, 110 pounds to me. Looks like she has a nice stride, but she's like, it doesn't feel the same. I don't float anymore, literally. Her pelvis is just in a different shape now. So that's an example of something that I think women can experience. And then of course, just the change in weight.

Yeah, it's huge. It's huge.

So what would you say to someone who says, I love exercise but cardio is the only thing that matters and they're not doing 100 mile weeks, but they're doing something cardio every day. And they're sort of averse to strength training. Given that you've experienced both ends of this spectrum and at very extreme levels, how do you think about this in terms of overall health beyond performance?

Yeah, I mean, I think you, when you think of health, you have to think about all these different levels of health. Right. So like, what is your hormonal health like, because that's going to really affect like your mental health, like how motivated you are, your energy levels, all that stuff. Right. So I just know for myself my own experience, like number one, like you can run every single day and be healthy, Right. But you do need something to, especially as you're getting older, to offset how depleting of the body that can be. Right. And that's where heavy lifting comes in. And I think I just say the word heavy and I can feel like all the runners being like, I don't want to do that. And I was the same way. I hated lifting heavy. But I think there are, there's ways around that, you know, and like we mentioned BFR a little bit. Like, I love BFR for runners because, like, if you're not, not. Here's the thing with lifting. Like, I've been lifting super heavy for six years and I've never gotten hurt lifting, but that's just because I'm in and I have crap form when it comes to a lot of things too. So it's not because my form is good, but I, I am intuitive in there, right. Like, if something's not feeling right, like I don't put on the weight, I don't go down. Like, I'm very cautious in the weight room. Right. So there are ways to like lift heavy and healthy. For runners, for example, the stuff that I love to prescribe to our runners are hex bar deadlift with the handles up so you're not going down as low, you're not loading up the lower back as much, that's much more running specific strength that is going to be great for your power development. I also love half squats for the same reason. Like a lot of running is just hip extension, right? It's like every time your foot contacts the ground, your, your hips have to extend to get out of that position. So we need to do things that really focus on that. So how half squat's great for that and your liability of getting hurt. Half squatting is way less than butt to the ground. So you can load up the bar super heavy with the half squat. Get all the hormonal benefits of lifting heavy, get the, the bone benefits of loading up a bar and having it on your back and avoid things like stress reactions, your bone density up that way and just feel really good coming out. There's just no other feeling than like lift having a bunch of weight on your back and setting it down. You just get this like huge rush of like, I don't know what is endorphins, energy, but I always just feel amazing coming out of the weight room, energy wise, you know. So there are ways to lift heavy in a healthy way. And then again, like if you don't even have access to heavy weights, you can do things like bfr. And I've, I've been playing a lot with BFR and I really like the feel of that as well. And I think it's a way for, for runners, you're maybe skinny, more concerned about getting hurt, to get the same benefits of lifting heavy without having to put a bunch of weight on the bar.

Do you ever have, have runners run in blood flow restriction? I, for the first time really like a couple weeks ago did some sets on the air bike. So like, you know those Airdyne bikes, I did like 2 minute sets with heavy BFR on my upper thighs. And I remember thinking, well, I remember not knowing what to expect, right? I remember thinking, okay, for two minutes I should be able to hold 300 watts or whatever. And it's like no freaking watts way. Like I was struggling to hold 200 watts for two minutes. And it wasn't that my heart and lungs were blowing up. It was like just the absolute pain in my legs. So I thought that was kind of interesting. And I was like, huh, I wonder if I was still cycling, like if this would be an interesting form of cross training. I don't know if it would translate to running because I can't really walk when I'm in the full bfr. So maybe it just wouldn't work and maybe it would be.

Be.

Maybe it's only amenable to being on a bike, but. And I also think there's certain exercises, like I once stupidly tried to deadlift with bfr. It was very lightweight, but I also thought it was altering my form a little bit and I didn't think, I didn't think that would be beneficial, so. But I love it. I do BFR every day that I lift. I do at least one to two sets.

That's interesting. I'm definitely going to try the BFR on a run next time I go for run. I'll be curious to try that.

Yeah, you won't be able to go as heavy as you do for like at least on my device it allows me to select, select low, medium or high intensity. So maybe if you set it at a lower intensity. But if anyone's going to experiment with it, it's you. So I'm curious to hear what you think.

Yeah, I'll try that out.

Something else I wanted to ask you about, which is we talk about sports like cycling where drug use is just the norm. There's never really been a clean era of cycling. We're probably in the cleanest era now for the last 10 years. But there was just no way you were going to be able to compete and be one of the 10 best cyclists in the world if you weren't using a performance enhancing drug. Non negotiable. So if you didn't want to use those things, you were free not to, but you were not going to be in the top 100 or whatever. How much? Well, I guess it doesn't seem to me that distance running has suffered the same thing. Right. We see it in track and field all the time. How much buzz has there been about performance enhancing drugs at the marathon level, at the world class marathon level level? I haven't been paying attention to it, but I really don't remember hearing much about it. And I'm curious as to whether or not that's been your experience and if so, why. Why do you think that marathon runners, which would certainly benefit from tons of PEDs, haven't traditionally used them?

Yeah, I think the thing that is the culture. Right. So for me, I knew guys who 100% weren't on it and were winning races. Meb, for example, he's winning Boston, he's winning New York, he's winning medals, Dina's winning a medal at the Olympics. And a hundred percent know they're not on it. Right. So I think that's Huge, Right? If you can think of one person who's doing what you want to do and they're not on it, you're like, then I can, too. You know, you look at, like, Lance and the cycling culture, and it's like, if that's not the case, then it becomes very difficult, like, to me, to be optimistic on the starting line, right? So, like, I always chose to believe everyone was innocent, even if I heard rumblings, just because, like, I didn't want to be at a mental disadvantage. Like, if I believe this person next to me is on something, then they already got one on me because I think they're just gonna be superhuman because they're on a pd, you know? So I always just believed everyone was innocent. I never, like, concern myself with too much about it. And also, like, honestly, I've been around a lot of training groups in the US A lot of different athletes. I've never heard of anyone talking about taking it, about having access to it. Like, I wouldn't even know the first. First step to even, like, how do you even find this stuff? You know? Whereas there. It's not like that everywhere, though, you know? Like, I've been in Kenya, and they talk about it a lot over there. And I'm not saying, like, Kenyans are dirty or anything like that, but the culture there is one where it's talked about more there, and I think that alone makes you think more athletes are on it. And there have been, like, guys getting busted, not just from Kenya, but from all over the world, you know, so it does happen occasionally in running.

What are the drugs of choice? Choice? Is it epo? Is it testosterone?

Epo. And then there's lots of gray line stuff, too, where people are just looking for every advantage they can get and maybe crossing some of those lines with Alberto and all that.

Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. What was the controversy around Alberto Salazar?

It was a large document of case thing. Of all the stuff that was supposedly going down, honestly, I kind of stayed out of all that and didn't even follow it closely, so I wouldn't even be able to do a good job.

I didn't either. But you're right. I guess there has been some rumbling about it. You obviously spent a lot of time in Africa. I know you've adopted four girls from Ethiopia, which probably speaks not just to your sort of love of children, but also how much you've embraced that East African culture. Having spent as much time there as you have, do you have a sense of what makes them great? How much of it is their genetics? How much of it is the environment in which they're raised? How much of it is the training, the mindset? Again, I would imagine if you're born poor in Ethiopia or Kenya, running as a way out would be viewed as playing in the NFL here or playing in the NBA or the major leagues. It is their sport. So when you think about all of these different factors, what explains the absolute greatness of this population in this really relatively small part of the world?

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's the perfect storm of kind of everything you mentioned, right? It's like highly motivated individuals who are highly genetically gifted. Like, you were talking about your wife's pelvis and it widening. There's like, I think, some theories about their pelvis being really small. Small and not being helpful for distance running. But, I mean, like, I just. I walk behind my kids on hike sometimes and just look at how narrow their shoulders are and how small their bone structure is. Right? And I'm just like, this is crazy. Like, they're just so small. And like, I'd be running next to highly. Gabriel Slossie, one of the greatest distance runners of all time. And I remember the first time I ran with him at the London Marathon. I caught up to his group and I was like, I'm running next to highly. Like, this is insane. Insane. And I just could not get over how small he was. I was just staring at his back. I was like, this guy is tiny. So, I mean, there's like this whole huge. Like their. Their makeup, their body, and to be honest with you, I think there's a lot more there, actually. I think they can run a lot faster than they're even running. I'm curious, like, their approach to train versus our approach to training. Who's doing it? Right. Not that it's one or the other. You know, it's probably like a blend of the two, but.

But you're thinking if they. If they adopted some of what you've done, talked about and what others talked about, as far as more strength training, more gap between intensities, they might even be able to be better.

Yeah, Cooling down, things like that.

What makes Kipchoge so great in your mind? And I think he really is the greatest marathon runner today. And I don't think that's just on the basis of doing this incredible feat of breaking two hours in a very controlled, unofficial way, but also just his overall marathon performance on the racetrack. What is it about Kipchoge? I don't suppose you Ever ran with him, right? Was he there in 16?

No, I don't think we ever. We were coming up at the same time. We're very similar in age. I don't know his exact age or if he even knows his exact age, but we're right around the same. So we crossed paths a lot. Like I saw him at the London Marathon a couple years ago when I was there. But I think obviously like genetically gifted, but also his like humbleness, I think that's a huge thing. It's like when you start to think you're great and that you've done all this great stuff, it almost makes it harder to get back there, right? Or to exceed it. It's like when you buy into how great you are that I feel like it kind of sets the limit on you. It's like that's your cap, right? And he is so like I've never seen anyone as successful as he is is he's, I mean he's got to be getting huge paydays to do these marathons, right? And yet living in super simple place with sharing a room with training partners, like, come on, like how many like multi, multi millionaires do you know that like do that, right? So like, I think there's something about like his, his mentality and humbleness and that's really what I've always found most inspiring about African runners, whether it's from Kenya or Ethiopia. And why I enjoy being over there so much and have fallen in love with, with their culture is just this like carefree, fearless mentality of just like I'm just gonna put myself in it and go for it. But Kipchoge also balances that with like being very controlled. It's like he controls his strength so, so well and I think that kind of sets him apart. Like when you read about his training, he's always talking about running like 80% max and everything being super controlled and, and I don't know, like, I have personally have not gotten results through that type of training, but it's without a doubt it's working for him. I mean, he's by far and away the greatest marathoner to ever walk the planet. Right? So whatever he's doing is working. But I honestly, I feel like a big thing is just his mentality. Like his, his mental approach to training and racing is the most composed I've ever seen in an athlete. So I think that's a huge part of, of it.

Do you think we will see a sub 2 hour marathon as an official marathon in our lifetime?

I Think we will, without a doubt. I mean, so a woman just ran 62 minutes, 62:50 or something for a half marathon, which is absolutely insane.

So that predicts 210 as a full.

Yeah. So I mean she could potentially run, be the first woman to break 210 for the marathon. And we're just seeing huge performances like this. And I think the whole.

How much of it is the shoe? Yeah, I was just going to say how much of it is the shoes?

Yeah, this shoe thing is really interesting because I don't think it's just the technology, like the technology, without a doubt, like people are running two minutes faster over the marathon with these shoes on. But I think it's affected the psyche a ton. I think what people think is possible now has just been blown up. Right. And so now like we're just getting people trying to do insane stuff. I mean like a sub two hour marathon, like that would have never happened if we didn't have these shoes. Like, I'm sure even Kipchoge wouldn't have even tried. Right. But now it's kind of opening the doors of like, what's possible here. And then you see a woman run 62 minutes for a half and you're like, if she can run 62 minutes for a half, like in an actual race. That wasn't even a set up, Kipchoge type situation. That was an actual race. Like people can do it in the marathon. So I am certain we will see it. And who knows too, like what other kind of technological advances will happen happen in the coming years. But the shoe thing has been profound from technology standpoint, but also from a mental standpoint for athletes.

Speaking of a mental standpoint of all of the stunts you've done, and I've followed many of them. The seven marathons in seven days, that is seven consecutive marathons in seven days on seven continents is in and of itself ridiculous. But it's made only more ridiculous by the fact that you didn't train for for it. So tell people a little bit about this thing and the extent to which you both got better during it and then kind of crashed at the end and how painful that last one was.

Yeah. So I was retired from pro running and one of my pastor friends from la, Matthew Barnett, texted me. He's like, hey, I'm doing this crazy challenge. Seven marathons, seven days, seven continents. And there's something just captured me about it. Similar actually to when I was 13 and went on that first run around Big Bear Lake. It's like a Similar kind of feeling where it's just like, there's just something about this. Like, I just got to do it. So I text him back. I was like, let me know if you want me to join you, man. I'd love to go. And again, running zero at this point, just in the weight room, just focus on strength training. He's like, okay, let's go. It's on. Whatever. So we end up doing it. And I was. I started training for it because I was like, okay, like, if I'm going to do this, like, I want to enjoy it. But then I was hating the training for it, wasn't enjoying it. And I was starting to get a lot of those same fatigue issues that came when I was running professionally. So I was like, you know what? Either I can enjoy my life for, like, the nine months leading up to this thing and not run hardly at all, or. And have a really bad week, or I can, like, train for it. Not really enjoy my life for nine months and then have a good week. I was like, I'll take the, like, the nine months of good living. So decided not to train for it. I mean, I did do. I was running, like, three days a week, like, between five and eight miles. Eight miles was my long run leading up to that. And so I was taking on this challenge where we're gonna have to run 183 miles, I think it is in a week, which is by far the most I'd ever done. I think the most I'd ever done was 140 miles. And you're hopping on airplanes. Like, you run, you get on the airplane. You run, you get on the airplane. Right? So, yeah, it was quite the experience. Definitely, like, trip of a lifetime. It was like. Like a group of people. So there's like 30 of us. Richard Donovan puts it on. It's called the world Marathon challenge. And he just. The guy who puts it on. Richard is such an amazing dude. This guy's taking 30 people around the world running marathons every day. I never saw him stressed once. I never even saw him close to stressed.

How much does one pay for the privilege of doing this?

I believe it's like, 40 grand. So it's a bit of a trip, but you're also.

Yeah. Because they're flying you privately. Obviously, you're chartering a flight. The only way you could make this work, work. So the first one, I think, if I recall, was South Africa.

Antarctica. So you start in Antarctica. Yeah.

Okay.

That was the coolest marathon you're running on snow. It's like a seven mile loop course. And I thought Antarctica just be like flat, just white, you know? But there's all these mountains. We're on a glacier. There's all these mountains going. We had to take like a Russian airplane to like, get down to there. It looked like something out of a movie. It was. It was super cool.

And how did that one feel? Feel?

It felt pretty good, actually. Funny though, I was so super into lifting, right? So my great idea was to take in 50 grams of protein like every seven miles or something. Cause I was like, I don't want to lose my gains, you know, so. Which is like the opposite of what I usually do, right? Usually it's like simple sugar. So I'm doing this and I get to like mile 23 of this race, and I am so out of it. Like, I'm like, I need sugar, like stat, like right now because my protein bar is like, hardly had any carbs in it. So they have this little tent that's set up and they. They put all these like dried fruit and candy and stuff in there, and it's an unmanned tent. So I crawl in there and I just grab like, as much candy as I can eating Skittles, and I started feeling better immediately. So, like, right after that, I kind of learned my lesson. I think I ran like, like 3:30 something on that one, which is kind of amazing.

Like, 3:30 is still a fast marathon for a. Yeah. Okay, so then where do you guys go from the Antarctica? Where's the next one?

So then we went to Chile and we got to sleep in a hotel room that night. So that was nice because there's only two nights during the week where we got to sleep in a hotel room, and that was one of them. So ran the next marathon and actually felt pretty good. You know, we're on concrete, not snow, so it felt a little bit better. It was warm.

What was the temperature in Antarctica when you ran that?

So it was supposedly really cold, but it must be like a dry cold because it didn't feel that bad to me at all. Like, I was in my regular run stuff that I would do if I'm doing a run here in Flagstaff in the winter time. Like, I had full tights at a long sleeve, and I had like a, like a shell jacket and gloves, like mittens and a beanie. And I was totally good. I wasn't sweating at all because they say like, you don't want to sweat because then it freezes on. You get hypothermia, you know, But I was. I was totally good.

So then South America you ran. How fast did you run that one?

I'm trying to remember what my time was. I think it was a little bit faster than Antarctica, but not a lot. But I didn't. It was nice because the Antarctica one doesn't beat up your legs because you're on snow, so it's a little bit softer. We always do all of our easy running on. On soft surfaces to keep from beating up your legs. And I was also in, like, the most cushy shoe I could find because I was like. Like, my legs are gonna take a beating. Because I think at that time I was like 170 pounds. So I was prepping myself for that a little bit. Then we flew to Miami, and that was kind of fun. It was like a homecoming back to the States, you know, but also warm. I had a little bit more trouble in that one. I think I was a little bit slower than I was in Chile, but not much. Like, maybe I was like, again, like 3:30 or something like that. And then we flew over to Spain, and I had the worst day ever in Spain. Luckily, like, one of my Dutch friends. Yeah, y. Y. He came over and he's with me on the bike the whole time. And I was just in the worst mood and having the worst day ever. I was like, running is the worst thing on the planet. Which I've said that many, many times. That's actually not a new thing for me to say. Even when I was running professionally. Running can be like, your best friend and like your greatest enemy all at the same time.

All right, so that's Europe. So then which continent next? Asia, I'm guessing.

Then we head to Morocco.

Okay.

For Africa. And we got a hotel room. Slept in that one. I was like, all right. Considering how bad I felt less than 24 hours ago, I'm gonna start out just super chill and just, like, make it through this, right? So I start that way. And then again, the mystery of running. Why you'd all of a sudden feel so good, I have no idea. But I just started feeling like a million bucks. Like, I started charging. Like, I felt like my old self. I was, like, mentally super engaged and, like. Like, just came home super quick. Like, I went out really slow and then ended up running, like, 304, which for me, off, like, zero. Training was, like, really good, you know? And so then I was, like, pumped. I was like, all right, now it's on. Like, I'm gonna just get faster and faster every day from here.

You know, so then is Dubai the next day?

So then, yeah, Dubai's the next day. The problem was, though, then after Morocco, I'm walking to get food with my buddy, and I just develop a little bit of a, like, limp. And he's like, hey, why are you limping? I was like, ah, my hips kind of bother me a little bit. Whatever, you know, just shake it off like you usually do with most running things, you know? But then the next day in Dubai is like, my hip was on fire. And I was like, this isn't good. Like, something's really wrong here. So I ended up walking, like, the back half of that marathon, a lot of it. So I don't know what my time was there, but it's probably up over four hours, you know. And then we head on the airplane to Sydney for the last marathon in Australia. And. And what was crazy, this whole time. Yeah, we're on a private jet with, like, you know, food and everything and movies. I didn't watch one movie the entire week. Whenever I was on the airplane, I was asleep. I was so tired. So we land in Sydney and I tried to stand up and I put weight on that leg where the hip was bothering me. And it's that kind of like, take your breath away wincing kind of pain that you get, like, super sharp. And I was like, oh, I'm in trouble. This is not good at all. Like, I had a hard time putting any weight on it all. And also too, like, I was so sick of all the little tiny things you do as a pro runner, like the mobility, the stretching, all that stuff that I wasn't doing any of that anymore. So I didn't wear my compression socks the entire week. So I got to Sydney, and my ankles look like elephant ankles. Like, they're so swollen, but, like, to the point where it was painful. I was like, I didn't know you could actually get pain from this, but, like, I could like, barely, like, bend my ankles. I was a. So I put on my same singlet that I wore my first marathon at The London Marathon, 2006, 2007. The same singlet I wore in that race, I put it on because I was like, this is my last marathon. Like, this is my goodbye tour here, you know, the same way I went in with a big long run, 15 mile run around big Bear. I'm going out with the bang too, you know, And I never got to say goodbye to the sport. It's like, I just like, kind of faded out and all of a sudden I was gone. My body wasn't able to run. I never got to say goodbye to the sport that I loved. So this was my chance to, to say goodbye. And so this last marathon, Manly beach, we did a mile out, mile back, mile out for the whole marathon. But it was, it was sick though, because it was lit up by the moon, the stars, all that stuff is just blazing. We're running for some reason. We started like 1am I was like, why can't we get some more sleep? We're running at 1am Was that because.

It was too hot to run during the day?

No, I think, I think Richard's thought process was just, he wanted to give people enough time to get it done. You know, it'd be like such a sucky thing to like not finish it within the seven day period because you had a really bad last day. So. So I think he's just trying to give people as much time as possible. And so it could have been good, like for me, like I kind of needed it that day. I, I like got a massage in the middle of that, but I went on to find out when I went home, got MRI that a stress reaction in my head hip. So massages aren't, aren't the best. First stress reaction doesn't do a whole lot. But yeah, I'll never forget like coming across that finish line. The sun was up at that point, took me five and a half hours, was like the longest, slowest, most painful marathon. It's like every time I put my leg down on that concrete, just like getting zinged with like that super sharp pain, you know. But I mean, after you've run six marathons in a row, you're like, I'm do whatever it takes to get through this seventh one. Like, I'm not stopping now and I'm never signing up for this trip again. So I got to get it done, you know. So I came across the finish line and these are just like all like runs that are set up by volunteers. So not like a ton of people. They're not like big productions, like major marathons, but still super cool. And I came across the finish line and I took off my shoes, left them on the finish line and something I kind of stole from wrestlers, Olympic wrestlers, after they, they wrestled their last match, they leave their shoes on the mat. It's just kind of of the symbolic way of saying, like, I've given everything I have to give and now like this season's over, I'm walking away, leaving my shoes on the mat. So I did that. I Walked away barefoot from the finish line. And I was actually, even though it was just kind of like me and a couple other people got super emotional at that time. I was like tearing up as I was walking back to the hotel just because, you know, running gave me so many gifts. It was so life altering for me. And the most beautiful part of all of it was the people. People, you know, meeting my wife, my kids, all the people I cross paths with. Continue. Like, I wouldn't be chatting with you right now, Peter, if it wasn't for that, you know, like that is what I hold most dear from all of the experience, you know, and what's cool about that is like it doesn't matter what level you run at. Like, we all get to experience that. You know, you sign up for any race and you're out there with a 50,000amazing people that are on a journey with you and we get to do it together, you know, so. So that whole sentiment just like hit me super hard. Just saying goodbye to the sport I love. But then, you know, it's been such a beautiful transition though of like realizing that that whole season it felt like it was for me, you know, like it was my thing that I was going after, seeing how good I can get. But I've since kind of realized, like, it wasn't just for me. Like everything I learned in that season was meant to be passed down. It was meant to be shared and meant to help other people. So it kind of launched me into the season of moving into the coaching space, coaching my wife, coaching other athletes in person, starting run free training where we coach runners of every single discipline, you know, every level, super slow people, middle school kids, like all the levels because like just it doesn't matter where you're at, right? It's a mat. We just want to be on the journey with you and want to guide you well and help you on your journey. So it was really special to kind of like realize that even all the mistakes that I made, they weren't for, not, you know, I'm on this podcast, I'm able to share it with your listeners and hopefully they won't make the same mistakes and they'll be better off for it, you know, and that's, that's really kind of like my goal now is like, how can I help people take this thing, living to the next, not just running, but living, be happier people. Like, I'm far more concerned with my athletes happiness than I am with how fast they are, right? Like, I want them to enter into the good Life. And I think running is a way to do that. Lifting can be a way to do that. It adds to that. But more than anything, like, I just want them to find. I want them to find joy.

Well, Ryan, it's been a joy sitting here talking with you about this. And I hope we get to meet in person one day because there's. I hope we get to work out in person one day. Actually. That would be a ton of fun to live together. And I'd love to try some of these crazy things you're doing. Not all of them, but actually I'm really intrigued by the. I wouldn't be able to do it with a fraction of the weight you just described, but the farmer's carries up the Grand Canyon. That's something that I could see wanting to do that one day. The Grand Canyon is such an amazing place to me. I've only been there once, but it's still probably one of the most significant things I've ever done. The season of my life in which I got to do it, the manner and how we made it physical. And I sort of made it a hiking, swimming trip. So I swam in the Colorado river and then in each of the waterfalls on the way up because you have these four huge waterfalls that get progressively smaller as you go up and. Yeah, it was just, I mean, it was just. I was actually just talking about it with one of my kids last night when I was reading him a story and the Grand Canyon came up and he's like, is that a real place? And I was like, yeah, like, this is real, man. And when you get, when you guys get a little older, we're going to be going back there.

Yeah, you need to bring the kids up. Start doing 20 minutes every other day. I'm sure you have 20 minutes and we'll go do it together. That'd be so fun.

Awesome, man. Well, I really appreciate this time, Ryan. And this was a. This was so much fun for me to just kind of be able to pick the brain of one of the world's greatest.

I loved it. Peter, awesome chat with you, man.

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Sam.