Episode 406: Dr. David Heitmann - Couch To 100 Mile Check In

Dr. Dave will be challenging himself to complete the Javelina 100 mile in 2024, going from the couch to the 100 mile distance in a years time. Dave has an extensive background as a medical director, treating thousands of patients, including: Olympians, National Champions, sports teams, and professionals. After losing his own health in the pursuit of helping others find theirs, Dave and his family embarked on a wild journey that included living in a bus, working on organic farms, traveling the country before ultimately landing them in Austin, Texas.

Endurance Training Simplified Series

Zach’s Low Carb Endurance Approach Series

SFuels: sfuelsgolonger.com code: BITTER5 ***FREE SAMPLE PACK LIMITED OFFER***

Janji: janji.com code: Bitter10

LMNT: drinkLMNT.com/HPO

deltaG: deltagketones.com - IG: @deltag.ketones code: BITTER20

HPO Sponsors: zachbitter.com/hposponsors

Support HPO: zachbitter.com/hpo 

Zach’s Coaching: zachbitter.com/coaching

Dave: mindofdave.com - IG: @mindofdave - YT: @mindofdaveMOD 

Zach: zachbitter.com IG: @zachbitter X: @zbitter Substack: zachbitter.substack.com FB: @zbitterendurance Strava: Zach Bitter TikTok: @zachbitter Threads: @zachbitter

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Introduction to the Podcast

00:07:39 - The Effects of Chronic Stress on the Body

00:15:09 - Indicators of Calcium Shell

00:22:40 - The Importance of Micronutrients and Supplements

00:29:51 - Adjusting Nutritional Supplementation

00:37:51 - Personalizing Dietary Approaches

00:45:02 - Raising Kids on Real Food

00:51:36 - The Impact of Traveling for Family Life

00:58:42 - Training through life's hurdles

01:05:40 - Incorporating Race Day Experience in Training Schedules

01:12:25 - Strategies for Balancing Running and Walking on Race Day

01:18:58 - Optimizing Training Load

01:25:38 - Balancing Running and Walking in Ultra Races

01:32:26 - Running vs. Walking Strategies

01:39:03 - Camping at the Race Start/Finish Line

01:45:57 - How Zach uses sponsor products

Episode Transcript:

I feel like since we chatted last, you've been on the move a lot. You're kind of more like your bus days. Almost. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. If we want to jump right into it. Yeah. If we start to start to do the update. Yeah. Yeah. How have you been Dave? Oh my goodness. It has been, what is the one word that I was thinking of, of starting the podcast off, I was thinking. Adversity is the word of the day, I believe. It has been a crazy roller coaster of a ride. And I knew going into this, I would have body challenges and mental health challenges. And, I was not expecting to have as many life challenges and travel challenges as I have. So it's been fun. like, holy cow, adversity has just smacked you in the face and you just have to keep overcoming it. Yeah. so, yeah, it's, you know, there's a body component, there's a mental health component. There was a diet component, adversity that I had come up with and, finally, after eight, nine years, I got an official medical diagnosis of what I've been dealing with. my father in law, who was struggling with cancer. We helped end his life and went through that whole process and funeral. We also went off grid into the mountain ranges of Arkansas with the scouts. and did training up there. so it's, it's been, it's been a journey and I can't wait to get into it. Yeah, yeah. Well let's jump in. I mean, I'm trying to think what would be the best part to start with. Maybe let's maybe let's start with the medical diagnosis. I feel like that's probably like something that would have been, just a bit of a, maybe a positive to some degree, because it's like, well, not necessarily a positive, but it's a positive. Knowing me, knowing what the path forward is likely to be now versus sort of like having, like, this dark room and you're just like throwing darts at a board in there is a lot more concerning, in my opinion, than having a challenge that's right in front of you. You can see it and figure out how to hurdle it. It makes a lot more sense of the things that I've struggled with and dealing with. because there's all sorts of mental health issues that come when you don't have a diagnosis of understanding what's actually going on in your body. And, you know, I used to call myself lazy. I used to call myself all these bad named types of things. And you go through and you wonder why things happen to you, right. and we all struggle with this and. I've seen dozens of porn, dozens of experts. I'm super well connected to the best people in the world. and what's crazy is when I was dealing with this in my main burnout days, and now I'm actually going to even probably stop using the word burnout, because this is an actual condition that became recognized when I was dealing with it. There was no diagnosis for it, and it was a myriad of symptoms that got put together. And in 2018, they turned it into a formal diagnosis called calcium shell disease. And at the time, even though I was training myself in functional medicine and I was doing food nutrition tests, food sensitivity testing, testosterone hormone balancing, you know, I was doing all the functional medicine things. this was not a diagnosis or really even a full thought process at that point. And it's because of the advancements in testing that we've had over the years of mineral analysis and, and just different things of understanding the body at a much deeper level, that we've now got to this understanding that this, in the nuts and bolts of it, the calcium shell disorder, disease, In, in some sort of acute trauma. We don't fully understand why it happens. The body goes into a shutdown mode where it flips the, like things like aldosterone and cortisol equation in your body, and it goes into the stress response where it actually starts leaching calcium and magnesium out of your bones and your nerve tissue. And I had this at such an extreme case. And now that I look back at it, I understand why my teeth fell out. Yeah. Like literally all of my bones were leaching calcium into my bloodstream. I had chronically high calcium, which is why we had, why we had gone down the path of thinking that I had parathyroid cancer. So I had all sorts of ultrasounds, and I was going down the whole cancer pathway, and that kept coming up negative. But I constantly had a ten and a half level of calcium, and we could see the calcium depositing in my soft tissues. So you can see this as a formation of calcium nodules in your joints. So when you look at my X-rays, it's an interesting equation of like you get a massive flood of arthritis, which is what I had. Like I felt like an 80 year old person. and that deposits in your tissues, and then the inflammatory cascade starts as a result of it. So you're leaching this calcium. You're leaching this magnesium. Your brain starts to not work because the calcium and magnesium balance is so critical for nerve function. and it frequently leads to bipolar disorder, depression, suicidal thoughts, extreme anger because your brain just literally can't function. And when I was at my worst, this was definitely the case. It was. I had no idea why I was getting angry. I had no idea why. Suddenly I would go from really happy to I would like my brain would shut off and I would collapse to the ground and start falling asleep, almost like a narcolepsy kind of situation. So it just explains a lot. And, and even now, the side effects that I've had over all of these years of my right meniscus in February tore my back again, you know, popped out of place three weeks ago. Like, all of these residual effects are now explainable. And it helps me get to that point of knowing how to move forward. And I've always been a person that just. Kind of pushes through things anyways, so it's affected me less than others, where probably there would have been a limitation and bedrest and things like that for me. As soon as something happens, I immediately start attacking it with rehab exercises and all those sorts of weird things that, you know, like within the hour, you know, my knee pops out of place and I'm doing all the stuff to it, right? Like I'm applying electricity, I'm applying cold therapy. I'm gonna try applying heat therapy, mobility, snapping my knee back into place, like all those sorts of things. so it affects me less than the average person. but overall like it having that explanation of why it's there and how I can now start to actually treat it at a different level, is very relieving, and I equate it to I'm kind of going on a long tangent here, but, when I was working with patients in especially ten, 15, 20 years ago, the average time to diagnose something like celiac disease or an inflammatory disease was 11 years. And I always sympathized with patients around that because one is I had inflammatory types of conditions that I couldn't explain. but there's this process in educating patients around, like, it's going to be a journey. Yeah. And you can't just take a pill and hope that it goes away. and now I'm one of those statistics, like it took me eight, nine years to figure out a diagnosis. and looking back, it's like all these floods of emotions that happen in, like, a sense of relief. And when I found it, this was probably four weeks ago. Like I really resonated with all my patients that I helped over the years get diagnosed and that crying feeling like that deep sense of relief of yeah, sucks to be diagnosed with something, but like that relief of oh, this is why. so that's been one of the big updates. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big one. That's definitely interesting because I think I mean I haven't had anything nearly that extreme happen to me. But it feels sort of like if you have an injury you know maybe it's limiting to some degree, maybe it's totally limiting and you have to stop the activity altogether, but you don't know what it is and you don't know how long it's going to last because you don't know what it is. And then you go and you get an MRI or whatever happens to be the thing that they're going to use to gauge what it is. And then they tell you, oh, you have this like you have a stress fracture, you have this. Oh, well, now I have a timeline. Now I have a list of procedures. Now I have like a blueprint essentially of what I can and can't do. And then you don't have that kind of underlying thought or back and forth in your mind of like, is this positive or this negative towards making me better versus this is definitely what I shouldn't do, and this is definitely what I should do. Yeah. And I think there's just a lot of peace in that. Like even though it's like, yeah, I don't want a stress fracture. I don't want to stop training for 4 to 6 weeks or whatever happens to be. But knowing that is better than not knowing that. Yeah, obviously this is extrapolated out into years and years and years of that kind of painful process of not knowing, trying to figure it out through whatever means you have. And then, yeah, now, now, you know. So. I did have one question. I have a bunch of questions actually, but one one was. So on that first episode we did when you were kind of describing just like a lot of your background and stuff, and when you were kind of in the middle of building your, your, your business in, in Madison, and then you had that kind of like breakdown where you're I think you said, remember, your bones were like, just really, really, compromise, essentially. So is that this basically does this. Yeah. First signs maybe of that. Yeah. Well, and it wasn't even the first sign. It was just there was no awareness of like, a condition, like, I just thought because my dad had a lot of orthopedic problems. I just thought it was like, okay, this is just who I am. my mom has a lot of bad teeth, you know, so like I just looked at it as, oh, maybe the root canals in the work that I've had in the past just, you know, weren't good for me. But everything literally crumbled. And I had four teeth literally crumble in my mouth and had to get the last pieces extracted. And I still have a lot of work to do there. My finger broke in half, my elbow had a stress fracture. and so, yeah, it's, How do I want to describe it? You. You want to think of the thing, right? Like, oh, why did my teeth do it? And you look at the teeth, or you look at the finger of just like, okay, well, I was applying a lot of force over years of treating 10,000 patients and you're adjusting someone. And it happened while I was adjusting someone's neck. so my neck cracked, of course, which is what you do as a chiropractor. Yeah. My finger also snapped at the same time. That one was like, huh? That was an interesting feeling. Right. and so I just thought put two and two together of like, repetitive trauma over ten years of doing this. Okay. This is just my body wearing down and I shouldn't. So it didn't even cross my mind that this would be a whole metabolic condition. except for when we were going down the cancer pathway of trying to figure out if it was cancer or not. and everything kept coming back. No, it wasn't. And then you're just left with. All right. Well, I don't freaking know. Okay? Just move on. Yeah, yeah Wow. Yeah. So when you. So when this happens, if you went and got, like, a blood test, would it actually say you have high calcium then since it's leaching in or is it. How does that show up on a blood panel? Yeah. So now there's a lot of different indicators of the best is going to be a hair analysis. So what ends up happening is the blood brain barrier, the barrier of entry into your nerves and your cells become walled off to the calcium and the magnesium. So it leaches out into your blood. Your blood levels look normal, your blood levels look a little bit high, but they'll still be within the normal range. What ends up happening is if you do a hair analysis, your magnesium and your calcium levels will like 300 x, okay. And so it's your body's way of trying to excrete. And what's interesting about that is when I look back at that time when it was the highest, and I think I had an extreme version of this behind my ears. I used to get these zits, and I thought that they were zits, and I would, like, squeeze them out and pop them, and these white crystals would always come out. And I just thought it was like this weird thing. They would leave, like, a little volcano. Yeah. You know, I was like, okay, well, this is interesting. I've never heard of this before, but whatever. It's just a weird kind of zit. Well, now that I know this and I look back at that, I was like, that's literally calcium excreting out of my body because it didn't know what to do with it. Yeah, I had all these weird inflammatory bubbles on my feet that would get hard. They were like pustules that would start on the bottom of my foot. They would be like a little hard blister and they would calcify over and then flake off. And all of that was just calcium trying to excrete out of my body because it was too high in my blood and just leaching out. Yeah. So yeah. Crazy. When I look back and I go, oh, all these things that I had no idea where indicators I should have been like, duh, these are all indicators. Yeah. That's interesting. The human body is weird. Like it. Has these interesting ways of dealing with a problem that aren't necessarily like longevity promoting, but it's just trying to get from one day to the next, essentially. So yeah, exactly. And I had no idea this was going on. And, you know, especially from the brain health standpoint, like, I really can look back and yeah, addictions get heavy. So like, that's why I was drinking myself to sleep every night. It was one of those things of, like, the brain just didn't know any better. And it was trying to fall asleep. It was trying to medicate itself. and that wiring just gets all crazy in there. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's all connected from that one core problem. Yeah. And that's why they call it a calcium shell. If people become excluded, they shell off. They literally both physically and mentally shell off to the world which was happening . I was getting excluded. I was losing friends. I was losing relationships. I was becoming a hermit. I wanted to just do nothing but go home and sit there. Yeah, yeah. So just matches like depression essentially. Yep. Yeah. Wow. So this is a relatively new thing in general. Yeah. There's just you and there's not even, well for, for me obviously it's a new thought process. Yeah. overall I would equate it to some of that inflammatory arthritis. And if you look back at fibromyalgia and things like that, it's just in the early stages of understanding this as a complexity of a diagnosis, where I think we're entering into the medical community, this next layer of medicine. 3.0 of understanding, kind of. That everything isn't mechanistic. Like we can't just say, okay, cholesterol is this. Here's your risk of heart attack, right? We have to understand that all these things, you know, weight gain come from a huge amount of things. Yeah. So one of the side effects is that when you have calcium, Shelly, your organs get enlarged and hard. And that's what I have going on, right? Like, I have all these ultrasounds of my liver, and, and organs and, and that's why my triglycerides were shooting up. There's dysfunction behind that. and it's very easy to fall into the trap of medicine 2.0, which is to say, oh, your cholesterol is high. Here's a statin, right? The reality is, the driving force behind all that stuff in me was that my calcium and magnesium were not working well. And over time, those organs enlarge and harden. and so treating that is actually the solution to my health and that's the medicine 3.0 approach. So I think that we're in the early stages of understanding these complex diagnoses and especially calcium shell like. When I look it up, it's even hard for me to find information on it. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's going to be a process that I'm excited about. No, no, I'm in a unique opportunity because I am getting out into the world and becoming an influencer, that I can actually talk about this and get this information out to people that I'm connected with. So do they have a protocol then once you know you have it like I'm sure there are certain things. They're like this is a better way to go than that. Yeah. Have you been kind of getting up to speed with all of that over the last few weeks? I did, yeah, I went into a deep dive and thankfully we were traveling and doing all these different things, so we weren't in our normal situation. So it allowed me to search for hours on end of all the medical research, of course. but, yeah. So the basis of this is, avoid all things calcium. So actually less greens, like, you don't want foods with all those bioavailable. Calcium availability. And you have to, like mega dose, magnesium, glyphosate, potassium and salt. Okay. And, that's the cornerstone of basically, I need to get up to like 1200 instead of 200 or 400mg of magnesium. I need to be in the 1200 range every day. Wow. and this is why I was getting cramps so bad and all of these sorts of things. And when I was trying to work out, like, I would hit a wall where everything just shuts down and the types of cramps I had never experienced before. It's like a knife jabbing into you and like you tear your muscles. And it would take 2 to 3 days to recover from a cramp where you literally feel like you have a torn muscle. and that's just because there wasn't enough magnesium in my body shuttling it into the nervous system to heal. so mega dosing, magnesium mega dosing, potassium mega dosing salt. I'm up to taking, like, when I'm on my runs now I'm taking two grams, three grams of salt with me. And then afterwards, part of my recovery strategy is just to throw Himalayan salt on everything. Yeah. but then also to like, there's all the other things that have gone wrong with me. So my mitochondria are really low and this is part of my energy problem. So I'm doing mitochondrial problem support. I'm doing brain health support. So it's creatine. It's glutamine. It's alpha lipoic acid alpha keto glutamate. Like all of the things that are carnitine, all of the things that are good for mitochondrial support, all of the things that are good for athletic performance, recovery. So high bcaas, high protein levels. So I started increasing even more, I realized through March, which was a whole nother conversation of me failing at carnivore, realizing that I still wasn't even getting enough protein and trying to do that because I just physically couldn't eat enough. so getting the protein levels up and, and it's already starting to make a big difference on getting into this type of supplement routine in this thought process that it's okay to take naps. It's so yeah. Okay to give myself that recovery position. because stress is basically the deleter of our body. It sucks even more things out of your body. The more stressful you are. So it's just mitigating stress and doing all these types of supplements. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. How much stress either exasperates it or leads to something like this in the first place. They're thinking that stress is the main thing, so that starts it. So some sort of traumatic PTSD type of situation. High high levels of stress, high levels of burnout. They don't understand why it actually physically happens, that the hormones start to switch over and start to block these things from getting reabsorbed in that equation, of the dynamic equilibrium of these chemicals. so they don't fully understand it yet, but, thankfully we can do stuff about it without having to understand it. Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting because sometimes you don't necessarily know if this is a genetic thing. Is this like a lifestyle thing or like a traumatic event type of thing? Yet to some degree it doesn't matter because you have it. You're not going back and changing any of those. So then what is going to kind of send you on your way without all the symptomatic stuff that comes with it? Yeah, exactly. So for me, it's I mean, I can already feel a difference. And I already knew magnesium was helpful to me, but I didn't know the potassium in the sodium thing. I've never. Amplified that stuff in my supplement and routine, right? Even all these 30 years of doing supplements, I never thought of sodium as, like, an essential nutrient that I should be thinking of, right? Yeah. Especially back in the early days, everyone was like, oh, what's your blood pressure? You're gonna you're going to cause kidney disease. And that's iodized processed salt that does that, right? Himalayan salt tends to not do that for people. Well, you're unique now too, right? And I'm unique now. And now I realize that I'm massively under sodium. And so for me, it's been a game changer already so I can feel less cramping. my three hour runs, which I'm now up to. And the planning that we talked about a little bit. The three hour runs have been so much more enjoyable. Yeah. Like, I don't feel like I'm hitting the wall. Whereas before I was, when I was doing, the three days a week where I was hitting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday on my routines, and I was going for an hour and 15 to an hour and a half. I felt like I couldn't recover in between, and I felt like all I was doing was torturing myself. It was like I was getting through the runs and I was making progress. But like there was zero recovery. And so as a result, like the carnivore diet that I tried to do in March just did not work out for me. And so I flipped back into doing more of the Mediterranean style. And then that completely fell off of the bandwagon when we had to go do the off grid thing. And scouts, sure, this will be fun for everyone. I challenged myself because there were such horrible food selections there. It's a scouting camp and there's 600 kids there. Their head chef had quit two weeks before the camp, and so there was no food like granola bars for the whole trip. Yeah, it was like PJ's and Pop-Tarts that were available. So I lived off of, like, this crazy ass food. Yeah. and so I took it as a challenge of how many Pop-Tarts I could eat to sustain myself in the long run. Which was a unique challenge for me. But Yeah. So. And then when I went home to do the funeral things for my father in law, the food selections there as well were, there was just no time to cook. There was no, you know, thought process towards any of that. So it was a lot of grab and go food. We did buy a lot of rotisserie chickens and things of that nature. We tried to make the best out of it, but still, like my gut was not happy with me. Of the selections of the occasional like, burger, fast food places and things like that that we had to choose. definitely. I got a lot of gas and bloating and all of those typical indicators that your food is not working for you, right? Yeah. You're introducing stuff you're not used to for sure. Yeah. So for you, it sounds like it's a lot of micronutrient stuff that you have to kind of keep on top of. Yeah, more so than it is the actual food itself. Although I guess you kind of have to stay. You said you have to minimize the amount of calcium you get in your diet. Yeah. So it's, you want to try to avoid all the bioavailable calcium stuff. So that's all the leafy greens type of stuff. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, so do you. I imagine with some of those numbers you're suggesting, you kind of have to supplement to some degree with it? Or is it just that you have figured out a way to just get that through your diet? No. God, there's no way. Way too much. Yeah, it's way, way, way above bioavailable of what you can eat in your food. So yeah, I've, I went from, in the beginning of this training, I was trying to limit my supplements and just pound through this with nutrition only sure to now I have a whole countertop and I'm probably in 40 different supplement range. Oh, wow. Yeah. Because I'm attacking it, right? Like I'm attacking it with ferocity. so it's creatine. It's glutamate powder. It is this really big, complex multivitamin that has probably 80 to 100 different types of things in it. carnitine, turmeric, curcumin, you know, sodium, potassium magnesium. Glistening. like all of the anti-inflammatory mitochondria support things. So yeah I was going to bring my list and I forgot it because it's such an extensive list. Yeah. it's fun to talk about, but, yeah I'm talking a lot now. Is that something where that's just your reality going forward because of the situation, or is it something where once you dig yourself out of a hole, you can taper off of some of that? Or I think once I dig myself out of the hole, it'll be fine. Which is actually one of the reasons that spurred me to do the hundred miler is I wanted to finish digging myself out of the hole. Yeah, I felt like I had gotten to 60% better or 80% better, and I was still just that broken couch potato, right? And I was like, okay, what can I do next? That's like, motivate me? Yeah. and so I feel like. The stars were in a line alignment of me making this decision to do this as like a challenge to myself. So going from a broken couch potato to 100 mile ultra is no easy task. But I knew instinctively what my body needed. And I feel like once I complete this, there's going to be a level of, you know, continuing on this lifestyle because it's enjoyable. It's what I need. I know my body needs it. And then, yeah, I'll probably start not taking as many of the supplements and things like that. But I think once for me, once I get my organs like I still feel swollen in my abdomen, it still descends out. I still have periods where, like if I'm not strict with myself, I immediately feel it. I immediately feel tired. Once that stuff goes away, then I know that I can be like, check. Yeah. Did it. Yeah. Interesting. So do you think you'll always have to have really high sodium and magnesium in your diet though. Or probably if I'm active. sure. Well, being in Austin doesn't help this bit in this heat. Yeah. Definitely. and it's, it's interesting because if I look back at my childhood, of all the different sports that I played, I mean, I definitely. I sweat a lot. And, I definitely had a good balance back then. but as I started getting sick in my practice, I stopped sweating. And so I think I'll be able to figure out as I go along, like, what that balance is going to be for me. I'll probably just naturally have to take more sodium. but it'll be very situational, I think. hum. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think of it like this, I don't have any of these issues, but if I'm doing a three hour run in July here in Austin versus off season in February, my sodium demands are quite different. So yeah, I would imagine yours are like that. Just maybe on a higher input level in general. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So like when I was running in Arkansas, and it was in the mountains, it was on some gravel roads and the sun was just beating down on me. You know, I was putting three grams of sodium in my little pack, my little water pack. and then making my own, like, little electrolyte energy drinks and then adding sodium and magnesium and all that stuff to my own little electrolyte mix. I was burning through a lot and I felt like I could still use more. Yeah. As I was, I was doing that. And when I was running in Wisconsin, it was 70 degrees. It was beautiful outside. I was running in the shade on the mountain biking trails, and I felt like maybe a gram to two grams of sodium was good, and I could feel satisfied with that. so. Yeah, it's, It'll definitely be an interesting game as we go along. It's interesting from that perspective. When I lived in Wisconsin, I remember thinking, oh yeah, there's these humid summer days and it is. But then you come to Austin for a while and you realize, like, okay, there's a whole nother level of humidity here. Yes. And I'm sure I mean, there's other spots that are even worse. So it's like I mean, Houston for sure. And then, you know, Arkansas is probably similar to Louis when I, when I did my chiropractic school in Saint Louis, that is the armpit of Missouri is like all of the smog, all of the humidity, everything just goes right down into that valley. Yeah, I can't breathe. Yeah. So yeah, it's interesting when you kind of have those components in there to kind of mess with your dosages and what you need, don't need. So it's definitely been interesting going to different parts of the country and training. because it's, it's made me much more hyper aware of the quantities of things that I need. And how I need to approach training. getting into the mountains of Arkansas versus the coolness of Wisconsin, like the night and day difference of training and my ability to continue running versus walking, in my nutritional feed, you know, feeling of what I need. So it's, I'm thankful that I had all this adversity because if I was just doing this in Austin, it would be pretty like, okay, I'm just going for another run. Yeah. But, the flexibility has actually been pretty helpful for me. so you before you were doing kind of a modified carnivore approach that for, for reasons we've just discussed, didn't work well. you pivoted to kind of more of a mediterranean version. So what are you doing? I know you're avoiding dark leafy greens for this. Yeah. Do you have to avoid, like, dairy or anything like that, too? Well, yeah. So that's that I do really well with cheeses so I know for sure like my body does. Well. But now I'm selectively not trying to do as much. So now I'm switching more into January February time frames. We were doing high cheese, more keto type of things. March. We were a true carnivore. and that didn't work at all for all sorts of different reasons. I just have no recovery, no energy metabolically. I wasn't there ready yet. so now switching this into more of a mediterranean, it's like I'm going out and buying more chicken versus steak. Sure. I'm buying more salmon versus steak, and I'm getting those types of varieties and a lot of olives, sourdough bread I'm adding back in. So I'm going to be much more liberal about those types of things. And then like this morning, as a great example, it was getting back into mushrooms and tomatoes and those types of veggies in my omelets kind of thing. Sure. So yeah, I'm excited about this change. Going into this. I think it's finding that balance point of, you know, training days versus not training days. Now I still have to play around with that. Yeah. Yeah. That's I mean, one of the reasons I find nutrition so interesting is it doesn't seem to me that there's like this, like a standard that just works. And it's like for every person I see that just looks like they're crushing it. On a specific dietary input, you can find someone who said it was just the worst thing they could have ever done, like they've got the exact opposite experience with it. So it is sort of the scenario where I think to a large degree, you just have to be willing to play around. I mean, with yours, you get a little bit of guidance, I suppose, in terms of what you need to avoid or what you need to focus on to get what you need for your specific situation. But then from there, there's still, you know, dozens of different inputs you can choose from. So we almost have this, we have this situation where there's just so much availability here in the United States. You almost have like, where do I begin? Type of a problem on your hands. And then. Then it's kind of like a little bit of trial and error of figuring out, well, how do I feel and how sustainable does this feel like? Do I feel good about this? But it's just something I'm never going to stick to or yeah, is this something I can stick to? But I just don't feel great about it? Or I feel like I'm leaving something on the table with. And there's just so many little things that are little puzzle pieces that need to be organized in the right way for you to kind of find those inputs that work well for you so well. And that's why I went back to my genetic test. So the last time I did a genetic test was a lifestyle genetic test, not a 23. And me. was 2018. And then they didn't have the research behind a lot of the enzymatic reactions of how well we digest different fats and different enzymes that play a role into diet and nutrition. So I redid those panels, and it did lead me to say that my body would work best with a Mediterranean or Paleo type of diet. And, because I don't convert plant material very well over into the essential fatty acids that I need. and so it was leaning on the genetic side. And then I got this medical diagnosis, and I had several months worth of training data to show that. Okay, I think I need to lean into this. I need to lean into my genetics and I need to lean into my condition. And then, by the way, here's all this real world data that I have of testing and measuring that, you know, carnivores just didn't work for me, even though I still love it as a solution for people. but it's just not right for me right now. I'll probably give it a try. Maybe in two years from now, when I feel like I'm healed. but. Yeah. So it's all data driven. It's all personalized now. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to take a year to do this as well as let's have fun with the data. Yeah. Yeah it's interesting. I feel like I've been really lucky in the sense that for the most part, I mean there's food that I just don't tolerate well and I avoid them for the most part. But it's a pretty small list. So for me it's more like all right what are the macronutrient ratios that I'm looking for for this phase of training. And then how do I make sure the inputs for that aren't like a void of some micronutrient that is important. So, you know, I can essentially just kind of put together a program and then run it through like a chronometer app or something like that and get a general idea of like, okay, this is a good starting point at least. And yeah, I can play around a lot more. Whereas some people like yourself have to be a little more specific. Yeah. It's, I don't know, I think we just have to look at it as being fun. And, the specificity is, is really what you want to make out of it. There's a stress level too. Yeah, to, tracking. Yeah. And so, like, I know a lot of people, I've personally had a lot of patience that you can tell if they stopped tracking, they'd probably just do a lot better. Yeah. Of specificity thinking. but I think that that's a much smaller percentage. I think the vast majority of people just have no clue what they're putting into their mouth. I always like tracking for periods of time when I'm changing the inputs. Yes. But once I kind of know, like, okay, these inputs are working well for me. I know about how much I need for various activity levels and stuff like that and how to alter that. Then I kind of kind of want cruise control, and I don't sit there and just plug everything into a chronometer anymore. It's usually just like a few days. Yep. And then it's like, okay, I know with this. And then if I change anything drastically, then, then I just do it again to just see, like, okay, what am I? Am I missing anything with this, with this change? But yeah, then I think I think you're right though, because like, once you kind of have that locked in, then it's just a lot less stressful or a little more intuitive to just be able to kind of go about the program. Once you kind of have it loaded in and and firing, it's an interesting aha moment for people. and myself included, I struggle with this as well as understanding just how much food 30 to 50g of protein is. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, when you look at that and you go, oh, I'm supposed to be eating six eggs for one meal, right? Right. And, that puts in, you know, a lot of people just want to do 2 or 3 and like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, perfect. And for me, what I need to get to is just my ideal. If I'm sticking at the one gram per where I want to be, you know, I need to get 200 throughout the day. And so I got to have four meals at 50, 50g and hit that upper limit. And there's all sorts of fun research coming out about after 30 to 50g. If you have more than one sitting, you know, it goes into energy production and all sorts of fun stuff like that if we ever wanted to get into that. But, Yeah. For me, I think just the amount of volume that you have to play around with, or tracking it for a little while to understand that you have to eat six eggs. But once you're done tracking that. Yeah. Cool. I know, I know this. Yeah, yeah. Are you the type of person where once you kind of have like, however many meals or like a kind of an approach, you're pretty content just rinsing and repeating day after day. Or do you like a little more variety than that? Man, I struggle with this so much because this is another thing. I think people range quite drastically on it. Yeah, they totally do. Both my wife and I are foodies and we love trying new things, and it creates so much chaos and it's so problematic from a training standpoint that it's hard to keep track of, of, you know, we just love trying new foods. and so there's benefits and negatives to that. One thing we know for sure is that diversity is by far the best approach overall to humans, anything. and so when we do get into our cycles, we will pick I think the average person works with 12 ingredients and they make seven different types of meals on average. we try to pick that at 14 to 20 and we'll stick with that for 30 days or 60 days. And then we'll switch into a different group of things. And that's why we constantly try new diets. We constantly you know one month will go vegan, one month we'll go paleo one month we'll and we just enjoy doing that. Whereas other people, there's a lot of mental fatigue that comes with choosing new food. And some people can't handle that stress. And so it over stresses them to try to think of new things. But. If you're going along for two years on the same diet and you're not hitting your goals, well, maybe that's something that you need to work on from a mental standpoint. Yeah. For us personally, our bigger problem is actually hunkering us down into a little food group for longer term rather than being short term. Yeah. I mean, you got a full family too. So like, yeah, we've got a family of four. Yeah. Even if each of you had your own, like this is the stuff I want, I can easily stick to this. It could still possibly be like a variety of stuff around because everyone would have a different preference. It is? Yeah. For the most part, our kiddos, they grew up with this style. And, we're very grateful as parents, when you start off with real food and you never do the, like, fake baby food and different things like that, and, you know, fun parenting advice, if you just always give them real food, they never know any better. Sure. But the other day, my daughter got mad at me because I said that I was going to have. I forgot how I put it. It was, it was something like, Yeah. We'll go back to having salmon for breakfast and some eggs. She's like, I need my vegetables, right? Like. And she, like, adamantly yelled at me because she loves eating vegetables in the garden. Yeah. And so, you know, it's like when you raise them to eat real food. Yeah. They just have a craving for it. And they don't know any better. Like their little fruit. Italians, they just plow in the fruit, they plow in the veggies and, they don't want like the tater tots and things of that nature. We still provide that every once in a while as a fun treat. but for the most part of their diet, they're right there with us doing these different things and, and you know a great example this morning it's like 12 to 15 eggs that I put in. And I put a whole pan full of veggies into this omelet and you know like they don't even question it. Like that's their normal breakfast routine. Yeah That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like one thing that I was, was going on from a line of thought when we started talking about this topic was just like, I'll see people sometimes where it's like they figure out a way that works for them and it is like, so rinse and repeat. And then there's like people on the opposite end of the spectrum, and I'm kind of somewhere in the middle. I think I can definitely rinse and repeat for a while, but I do enjoy kind of like pivoting after a while. So this is one of the reasons why, like I've been doing a low carb diet for 13 years in that state. Constant. But the inputs I've used to get to the macronutrient ratios that I'm usually targeting during different phases of training over those 13 years, I mean, those have changed drastically. and not necessarily like by design. It's just like, all right, well, this is what I'm targeting with it. Let's try this and see what it's like. And then sometimes I don't like it and I pivot sooner rather than later. And other times it's like, oh, this is kind of fun. I like this. And then I stick to it a little bit longer. But the one thing that's kind of always been the same is I eventually get to a point where I'm like, okay, I'm going to try something a little bit different. Within this, these parameters. So I kind of have a scaffolding that's more macronutrient based. And then what goes in from there is a lot more flexible. So I'm maybe like a hybrid of both of those approaches where I have some structure that's pretty rigid. But then I also have, you know, some spots that are quite flexible but yeah, I see people that are rigid on both sides of that. And that seems like a pretty unique person probably. But for the people it works. If you look at bodybuilders, yeah, they're probably like that. This is always I mean, I don't know, props to them. And on their ability to do this when they do like a six month program and they are eating nothing but chicken breasts and broccoli, it's just like, wow, how do you do that? Going to the gym for like three hours plus per day? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are so ingrained into a specific routine and they've got their six canisters all lined up of the exact chicken breast broccoli ratio. And, and it's fascinating to me that they can do that. Yeah. I just never would be able to stomach that for the long term. I was talking to Mark Bell about that at one point. This was probably years ago when he was on the podcast. I can't remember, I think we were talking about because, I mean, he's done everything from powerlifting to bodybuilding to marathon training. And yeah, so he's an interesting guy to talk to about just fitness in general. But he was saying I was just asking some questions about bodybuilding programming and stuff like that. And he's like. Oh, when they get to that point where they're like 4 to 6 months out, it's like it has to be dialed, like it can't, like nothing can escape. And he told me a story. I can't remember which professional bodybuilder it was, where he was like, I mean, he had already won a bunch of stuff. So he had just signed this big sponsorship deal with some company, and it was kind of like this breakthrough for him where it's like, okay, I'm here. Yeah, I'm established. I've got some financial freedom now. And like, he went out and celebrated and he was like, maybe like a few weeks or a month or so away from his next show. And he's like, I screwed the whole show up that night. Like one mistake. Like one mistake, like that's how precise they are when they're getting to that level of like, yeah, you know, the world's best at that. And they have to stick to that program that they found that gets them to the spot. That's going to put him on the stage with a medal around their neck eventually. Exactly. Yeah. And then and then they sacrifice it. And it's an interesting concept too, of sacrificing their health, even though we all from an external perspective would view that as healthy. Right. It's anything but. And they'll tell you anything. But yeah, exactly. Like the amount of hormone disruption that the whole profession goes through is just insane. The aftermath of it takes them 3 to 5 years to recover from that and start to get, you know, some semblance of hormone regulation afterwards. Yeah. It's crazy. Yes. And it's no wonder why that sport ends up getting to be like a sport of performance enhancing drugs because like. Yeah. And to that sport's credit, they've sort of differentiated where it's like, oh, you guys want to just use all that stuff and make this unsustainable lifestyle maybe a little more sustainable through performance enhancing drugs. You go into this category, you want to try to do it naturally. I'm all for just the separate leagues and just announcing, like, let's be truthful about it. It just puts you in the right category. Then we want to worry about it. And it's like, yeah, other sports haven't really done that. There's kind of like, yeah, they're like there's this facade of imagining two baseball leagues, right? Exactly. Yeah. A natural baseball league or like. Yeah, and cycling is probably the best example of this because it's like it was at least the most notable where it was like everyone kind of like there's this trajectory of thinking like, oh, well, these guys are like insanely well, they were insanely talented, but they were also all like on a program. And then like, you know, the whole Lance Armstrong stuff comes out and then we start realizing, like, okay, well, these guys are all doing something. And then you start looking at it, it's like, well, why are they doing it? And you look at just the actual like. Ebb and flow of the tour de France, and how unhealthy and unsustainable it is to do that. Yeah, it's like they probably like it if you take that one of those Tour de France athletes and have them do it natural versus doing it with some sort of performance enhancement is probably healthy for them, healthier for them to do it enhanced than it would be natural. Yeah. At least at the caliber they're trying to do it. Yeah. Granted, you could always ratchet things down, I guess, and tear themselves apart. Right. Yeah. So it's like this weird thing where we've sort of gotten to this pinnacle of sport to some degree where it's like now we've crossed the threshold of this being good for you to you're making some health sacrifices in order to be that good. Yeah. And then like, it gets ratcheted up with the doping and all that stuff that goes with some of it. So yeah, I would be excited for the sake of research. I would love to see a sport go all in and say, please enhance yourself as much as possible. Well that's the enhanced games. And we're going yeah well yeah. And we are going to monitor every single thing that you do for the sake of human performance research. because it's, it's such a, you have to have extremes in science. Right. And so like the testing ground is sports. It would be amazing if, if we actually all got on board and just digitized the crap out of them and I could look at every single little metric. Yeah, it'd be fun. Did you listen to that interview on Rogan where he had on the enhanced game, the guys who were putting that on? No, I didn't. Yeah, you should check that out because they talk about that. Where? Because I think, like, you know, some of this is just marketing, but you see that kind of roll out and you kind of roll your eyes at first like, oh, here we go. Like, yeah, okay, this guy's gonna break all the world records and he's going to be just, like, juiced up. But like, when you hear him talk about it, it's like, oh, you know, that's actually kind of interesting. it seems like it's a lot more. There's a lot more clarity within it, at least where they are looking to kind of do a lot of that, kind of like there's it's not just like a freak show, which is what you kind of expect it to be. There is some of that where it's like, no, we don't want people going just off half cocked and injecting things in because they think it's going to make them faster or stronger. We want this to be something where we learn like, okay, well, yeah, where are these? Where are the right inputs for this? And there will be a lot of downstream stuff that'll come from that just like the average person who's not competing at anything professionally, but they just want to age better. Yeah. Yeah. You know, which is the vast majority of people like, you know, they want to know, like what can I do when I'm older that will make me feel younger and improve my quality of life. Better through the end versus having a scenario where, yeah, I lived a long time with that. Last 20 years really sucked, right? Yeah. Longevity, health span, health span is key. I'm a big proponent of. I love the way that the world is shifting right now with focusing on muscle, focusing on healthspan instead of just longevity. Like, if you want to live to 120 years, that's great. But let's talk about the vast majority of people that when they get to age 54, 55, they already have six out of ten people with a chronic disease. Yeah, right. Like let's work on this Healthspan equation. And that is going to significantly change the population. Yeah. In that let's get 80 quality years and then work on 120. Yeah. Exactly. And wait for the gene therapies I mean because honestly statistically speaking, like when we're talking longevity, we're going to have to make a significant leap and not our current paradigm. We're going to actually have to change the genetics of people in order to start to get to that. 120 to 150. because there's some things that just naturally happen in the aging process. And so that's coming all down the road, which is exciting. But for the average person right now, you can start by gaining some muscle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Work with it. You got you know. Exactly. Yeah. So you're there when they have the real good stuff. Yeah. Yeah yeah. It's interesting stuff. Okay. So we covered a lot of your health stuff. But you are also traveling for just family life issues and stuff too. So how did that impact everything since we chatted last year? Tell us about it actually first. Yeah, yeah. Well, so a year ago, not quite a year ago, my father in law got diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer. And so we knew this was a long time coming. We had already, oddly enough, a couple of months before he had gotten diagnosed, we had bought him his dream bucket list to go to the Daytona 500. Oh, cool. He's a huge car guy, and his cars were his whole life and racing and all that kind of fun stuff. so we had already gotten him tickets to that. So in February, we were able to bring him to the Daytona 500. We traveled, we went and saw, we brought the kids to Disney. We went and watched the space launch of a $69 million rocket. And we were only right on the border of where you could watch it and you could feel the rocket take off. It was so cool. so we did all these epic things traveling through Florida in February. and then it was like with everyone. he he got to that point where, okay, he decided to end treatment because it was no longer effective. The cancer had spread throughout his whole body. so we were kind of in a waiting and holding pattern in March, and then we went to Arkansas for a Boy Scout camp. So my girls are in an all girls troop in Boy Scouts. Okay. During this time, Boy Scouts has now rebranded to. Yeah, that's all Scouting America all one now, right? Yeah, it's all one. In 2017, they started having female troops and, and integrated troops. and so now they officially rebranded just as Scouts, which was really cool. So my girls are in this all girls troop and they dominated the competition. They won the whole camp award and spirit award, and they volunteered the most. They did the flag raising ceremonies. They helped in the kitchen. It was so epic to see them during that time. I got probably my most amazing training run. Yeah, because I'm in the mountains with no stress. We're just camping out of a canvas tent and I had no responsibilities. Like there's, you know, the kids take care of everything themselves. We're just there because, you know, for things when they go wrong, we're not even allowed to actually help them. I must say, ask. It's a really cool culture. one of very strong independents. And so I got to sit around on a lawn chair. I got to work out. I got to stretch. I got to even though it was really crappy food, I was like, I just gotta sit back and eat. I didn't even have to make the food like it was a very relaxed environment. And so I got my highest mileage in training per hour during that time. And it was just like, you're running over all these beautiful streams and through the mountains and animals and wildlife running with me. It was so cool. and Then we got back and we had the bad news that, father in law was deteriorating. So we went and drove back up to Wisconsin, went and helped him get his house set up, and then drove back to Texas. And three days later, we got a phone call that he was basically going into an end of life type of thing. So my wife flew back and a few days later, my wife or I took the kids and we flew back and we stayed a couple of weeks in Wisconsin. And from a training perspective, I was able to hold true to all the training. And, it's really satisfying when you have every excuse in the world to not train. It feels really good to say that you can train, and that you got through it, and that you're able to push through and, and, it just really helped with stress. It really helped with the mental health component. It was just a yeah, I don't even know how to describe it, but it was good to get out there by myself during all these times and just think through problems and, think about life and end of life things. I'm a big proponent of stoic philosophy, so I love talking about death. I love thinking about death. And so here it is. Death is right in front of me. And, my wife had a beautiful experience of being with him as he passed and, very grateful for that, that we were able to be up there for that. Yeah Yeah. Yeah. I find trips in general where you sort of go in with this mindset of, okay, this is going to compromise my training or compromise something I'm working on, and then you're able to actually make it work. They give you that that confidence of not going into things like that in the future with that sort of negative, because I see that, like, I've had enough scenarios now where it's like, I got a trip that should be fun lined up, and I'm kind of like dreading it because there's some, like, uncontrollable that I wish I could control and then it ends up not being a problem. You end up actually liking having more time to do it than you expected, and you're like, oh, this wasn't bad at all. It was actually a little more like you kind of said, a little less stressful, just probably because you get the excitement of newness and you just get like that break in your kind of like monotony of your normal schedule, and it gets really fulfilling. And then you come back like, okay, I got to remember that next time. So I don't like to spend the few days before going into it thinking, oh, well, this is going to make this harder. It's gonna make that harder. Well, it was an exploration thing too. It's really cool to hear the sad, happy story here. Her parents had lived in this house for I don't know, six years, I think it was. And of course, we've gone back there multiple times a year to visit. I had no idea that it was like this world class mountain biking area. A half a mile away from their house. And it's like, it's because I'm training and I had to figure out trails to go on that. I was like, what the heck? This thing has been here this whole time. I had no idea. Yeah. And so it just lit me up like a Christmas tree, being able to go mountain biking. And it was this really steep slope. They had all these cute little labels for all the different trails. So they had the Nasty Goat, they had the Gnarly Goat, they had the road rally and they had all these ramps built and teeter totters that the bikes could go over. And it was just such an epic trail. And I had never experienced that before all those years that I had been going there, that this was right down the road. And so for me, this has been a really eye opening experience of how much living the integrated training life can be such a benefit of, like allowing you to explore a local area and seeing what it has to offer in like the beautiful nature that's out there, the beautiful connectedness that can happen, the therapy that can happen of just going and getting lost on these trails. Like I purposely didn't bring up the map. I just started running down and running through the trails. Right. and so it was just a beautiful, beautiful lesson in life for me. Yeah, yeah. It's always like there's a balance between and this is kind of like the nutrition stuff to a balance of structure and freedom that is just like the right match. And if you can strike that, it just feels like everything kind of flows a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, training is going well despite some pretty massive hurdles, I would say, in terms of other life life factors, which to some degree is kind of. You know, from a programming standpoint, coaching standpoint, a training standpoint, it's one of those things where you plant a goal as far out as you did in a year. You know something's going to happen, and it's kind of like organizing, like kind of the grander structure in a way where it can accommodate something like that because you just don't know, like, yeah, I mean, usually it's not something it's usually it's not something to the degree that I mean, you've had a couple big things that I would typically not expect either of them to occur for one person, much less both to one person. but there is going to usually be something like most common is probably just like, oh, I got a little bit of an injury. Yeah. And now I can train for four weeks, or maybe it's just a few days. And now we have to kind of reorganize things in a way. So it's like, how do you kind of give yourself enough time to be able to absorb those sorts of things as they come up to it? But, yeah. So getting through some of that stuff now, you kind of have like a ramp if you've got some answers from the nutritional side of things we're consolidating our training time. So yeah, I'm excited that we decided to do that. Yeah, you know, this is the power of coaching, right? Right. It's being able to bounce ideas off of people who have been there and done, you know, so much wisdom. Well, and I think half the time it's like people would generally do better finding a path forward within what fits their lifestyle than trying to, like, reinvent everything to the degree where now, all of a sudden, every other aspect of their life is trying to tread around this like, unsustainable approach for them. and that may change from one phase of the training plan to the next. And sometimes it lines up nicely though. So like when we get to this point in the calendar for a race like Javelina, consolidation is actually like a pretty good lever. It's not like when you have to work around if someone is like, hey, I'd rather consolidate or that fits better, that's actually a little better in most cases, because, I mean, running 100 miles is an extreme consolidation. Yeah. So you're getting more specific to what you'll be doing. And it's also something where the hardest part about consolidating into fewer runs is usually like if there is a real heavy speed work component, where then it's like you have to try to figure this balance between getting an A volume in any one session, but also jamming in enough intensity to hit the, the, the, that side of things. And then sometimes I actually don't think this is necessarily a problem or as big of a problem for long ultras, because sometimes it can actually kind of encourage some experiences that you're not going to likely see in training that you will see on race day. It's sometimes a little bit more of a like, let's be careful here, because you do increase your injury risk when you're starting to increase, consolidate volume and then build like a speed work session in the middle of it or something like that, that you want to be mindful of and just be paying a little close attention about how your body is bouncing back from certain things. But yeah, generally, I think, like you get to that point and it's like, we want you to start experiencing more of what you'll be doing on race day so that when you're standing on the start line and then heading out on that first loop, you're like, okay, I have all these tools that have been stress tested through countless runs. You don't feel as disconnected from what you're trying to do, even though it's something you've never done before. Yeah, yeah. To me, it's, it just feels right. Like, I think I sent you a text. Messages like this just feel right to consolidate. Yeah. And, I feel like I'm going to. My body is going to respond in a much more favorable way. So to me, that was the only thing that matters. Like, I'll adjust my schedule, I'll adjust everything else I have to in order to make it work. In consolidating these down, I think it just allows me to plan better. yeah, I guess that that would be. I'm excited to move forward with it. Yeah. I think, like, there's sometimes this there's like some just changing to keep it exciting stuff too, where I find like when I get done with like a hundred mile long and development phase where it's like, okay, I've had like these really consolidated long runs and then the other days are a little lighter than normal because you're just bouncing back from that consolidated training load that can be appealing for all, because then you're like, okay, on these days I'm on like, this is the focus. I'm spending like a good chunk of this day with that workout. And I know it's going to take me an hour after the run to recover, right? Like you've got all these mental things, you can easily invest a full day into a single run with everything that goes into it from just like all the, you know, all the just so you can recover basically. Yeah. And then but then you have a day where it's like, okay, I'm really not doing, maybe I'm not running at all. And then it's like, okay, well what do I put into that time frame that I would have been doing more moderate, lower, lower volume stuff when it's spread out more evenly. Yeah. And it's just about kind of getting kind of a groove within that system. And people favor those or dislike those more, more, more or less. I find a lot of times there's like there's a staleness that occurs after too much of it where I'll get done with like a longer. I'm actually kind of in this right now, where I did a 100 mile race about a month ago. And, you know, that was the lead up to that was a lot of high volume, lower intensity stuff consolidated. So once I recovered from that and started kind of putting structure back in the training, it was like I was actually kind of excited to have like, oh, there's really not a long run to the degree that I was doing just a month ago on the schedule anymore. So I'm not dedicating half of Saturday to training and then the other half to recovering from it. It's like, oh, Saturday's session is done in an hour and a half, two hours, and I don't really feel that bad after it. I can kind of go about something else. but then the intensity is there. So it's like, okay, I've got to like, you know, this time in Austin, probably get up early because I don't necessarily want to be doing like short intervals in the heat of the day or anything like that, if I can help it. So there's the whole, like, okay, get myself out of bed earlier than I normally would, get down to the track and pay a different price from high intensity, lower volume stuff. But it's just like it's new. It's not new. It's it's it's. It's a transition from what I was doing to. So it's fresh, it's exciting. You see that improvement a lot more because it's something you're kind of you're you're you're addressing it because it's a spot that can stand to gain more than the rest from your global fitness. So, you know, I'll get through that. And I'm sure by the end of it I'll be sick of short intervals, long intervals. And when I kind of go back to some long run stuff and that'll feel great then. But I think that's probably why I still run, to be honest with you, because it's like I'm going to do something physical. Yeah. So then the variety within the sport is because people think. I think when people look at running or sport in general from the outside, sometimes I think they look at it very like kind of monolithically in the sense that it's like, oh, it's just this same thing over and over again, because they all know a person who runs every day at lunch during their lunch break, and that's all they ever do. Yeah. Uh Huh. But they don't necessarily like the periodization inside of it, which I think is what keeps me interested in it because I'm never really doing anything too similar over and over again before I have some sort of shift. That, and to me, I can do anything for three months, like that's. Yeah, you know, you can really like to put your brain to that of, okay, my goal is just around the corner. I've got three months of hard training to do, you know. It's okay. My Wednesdays, my Saturdays, you know, are this my Mondays? My Thursdays are this. And it's just really hyper focused. And then as soon as I know that that race is done, I know I'm completely shifting. Right. And so to me, there's that relief that happens off, okay, I can put up with, you know, a whole Saturday going away. This is what I signed up for. This is what I'm excited about. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Cool. yeah. What questions do you have about what's coming up? Do you have anything that's like, oh, I need to ask Zach about this now or. Well, yeah. So now that we're consolidating, it's it's, we talked about, and I didn't look at my new plan yet, so, maybe this will answer a lot of that, but we were talking about seven hours in total. And kind of the way that I was thinking my schedule would be best right now would be three hours on Wednesday, three hours on Saturday And I'm electing to think of my rehab, just the other days. And then like a Monday of, like a lift. Do I need to try to get it? I don't know what I'm trying to ask, because if I get seven hours, like, do I want to count that as a run for another hour somewhere in there or an hour walk? Like where? Where should we start to think about that? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say like, well, once we start consolidating to the degree where you're doing like three hour plus sessions, we sort of want that to be a little closer to race intensity than we do. Like just, okay, now go and run for three plus hours and don't walk. Yeah. So the way I usually look at it is like there's enough mechanical differences and just recovery needs that range from you running versus you walking or hiking. Okay. So this is why sometimes when you see some of the mountain runners, or even like skiers, where the impact is way lower, their volume is just massively higher. Not necessarily massively, but it's higher because they're eliminating one of the more stressful, harder recovery parts of it. So when you get into 100 miles, it's sort of this weird kind of balance for most people between like on race day, you're going to be running some of it, you're going to be hiking some of it, you're walking some of it. So we sort of get to this part where it's like, well, these are all skills that you're going to be using on race day. How do we actually work on those? And I would say for seven hours, we would probably want you to skew more towards running for that. Okay. And then where I think there's some flexibility in that is like any walking, you can kind of pad that with that isn't interfering with the stuff you're trying to do outside of it are all great value adds that I think are going to be at very low cost. So if we did like three sessions, three, three and one that were more running skewed with those three hour sessions being more like, okay, run what you can and recover from and then sprinkle in some walking, we can kind of balance that out through the rest of the week, where it's like when you have opportunities to go on walks, hikes and things like that. And bonus if you can include your family and kind of like have like, you know, so you're not like disassociating too much and investing too much into your own training versus engaging with them and stuff like that. I think that's just a huge value that people don't look at because they're not thinking of it. They're not thinking, oh, I went off for this walk or hike. And because I did that, I didn't go for a run and that's going to cost me for the race. It's like, well, no, let's imagine like a 5050 split between running and hiking on race day. Most people are going to skew that training to be way more towards running than 5050. So they're sort of leaving it a little bit of an imbalance from the specificity on race day on the table. If they're not saying, oh, well, I went on that hike with my friends or with my family, and it didn't feel like training because it was kind of fun. It was really low intensity. I didn't feel like I had to recover from it. I may have actually felt like it rejuvenated me versus stressed me out. That's an actual skill set that you're going to literally use at Javelina. Cool. Yeah. And maybe it won't feel as enjoyable with 80 miles in your legs, right. But you will be doing it well. And I think yeah, I think that brings me right into my natural next question: two months ago, when we first started the three hour runs I was at, you know, I would only make it two hours and 45 minutes and I would just kind of like, I hit my wall kind of thing. But I was walking probably an hour and 40 of that because my heart rate would shoot up to 160. And, you know, I would be mindful of trying to mind my recovery. Sure. Right. and now this last time, I only walked 40 minutes, which was exciting. I'm making massive progress on the three hour run. Your paces are getting a little faster, too. Realistically. Like, where should I be in that? because obviously I'm switching over to almost all trails now instead of road running. So my heart rate jumps up higher naturally because there's a lot more hills, there's a lot more rocks you're hopping over and those sorts of things. So. Statistically speaking, like I need to walk at certain times to keep my heart rate into the zone that I'm supposed to be in and not have it shoot up to 160 to 170, right? Is there a recommended timeframe of if it's a three hour block, like, am I supposed to be at 30 minutes of running, an hour of running, like where, where is going to be a good goal for me to try to think mentally of how much walking during that three hour run. should be. Yeah. I mean I think you're, you're, you're heading in the right direction kind of monitoring intensity. So like if you're on trails then you can sort of let the trail dictate that to some degree because it's just going to be like certain spots that are flat, more like less varied, maybe slightly downhill. It's like, oh, you can run down that. Yeah. Without it or run on that without it, like spiking your heart rate. But if it does, then I think you could just use that as a sign. Okay. Pull it back for a little bit, take a walking break. But if you're on trails a lot of times, sometimes those will dictate it more, where it's like you get to a hill and it's like, well, I'm looking at my heart rate and it's staying relatively high or at the high end of what I want with hiking. That's a clear sign. I probably shouldn't start running right now. Yeah. if you find that that's happening a lot, though, I think there's some, there's some we could get some value from adding some components inside of those sessions where it's like, okay, for this eight minute stretch or six minute stretch, we actually want your heart rate to go up, maybe 1015 beats higher. If I stopped paying attention to my heart rate and I just ran naturally, I'd be finding myself in the 155 range of where I'll still run up the slight inclines and my heart rate will just stay at 155. And if I don't look at my watch, I don't perceive it. Sure. So that's why I was kind of asking this question, like if I'm, you know, anal retentive about looking at my watch in real time, I can keep it down. I'm walking just a lot more than I naturally would. so, like, what is that good strategy? Yeah. I think one thing we should maybe look at doing with your plan, then, is let's do it. Where? Let's say we have that structure of two, three hour sessions. We'll make one of them kind of like the rains are off, so okay, you don't have to kill yourself, but like, if you feel like running up a hill and your heart rate goes up 15 beats per minute higher than what you would normally want it to be, just ignore it. As long as it keeps feeling good, okay? Try to pace it in a way where it's not miserable at the end. but give yourself that freedom like this run. The intent is that there's periods of time where my heart rate goes up a little bit, and we get a little bit closer to, like, your lactate threshold. Got it. And then the other one's maybe a little more controlled. It's like, all right, this one I'm going to kind of put the governor on heart rate so that I stay at that kind of thing that makes perfect sense. Then my Wednesdays are going to be easy. Sure, keep my heart rate low and on Saturdays I'll go out. Yeah. And let it go a little bit. Yeah. Because that'll balance some of the intensity side of things that I think we do want to probably phase in for, for at least a period of time because we're not. We're a little further out. I think we're like 14 weeks out from Javelina if I'm thinking about right around there. So it's like we have some time before we want to be overly mindful of like, all right, what's the opportunity cost if you're pushing a little harder on one of these, is it going to take more training off the table? The way we have things structured with you? I'm less concerned about that because it's not like usually that's more of a concern if it's someone who's done this a bunch of times and it's like we got a six, seven day training week, and if I have them do a run like that, then it will likely compromise their next run. Whereas for you, it's like you finished that run, you're looking at a rest day after that. So if we do overextend a little bit, it may actually be a benefit because we may actually want that additional training load because we've got enough of the recovery around it. Okay. how quickly are we going to start ramping up then would be the question, because I'd like where where would my peak be, my peak training be? Would it be the end of September, beginning of October time frame? Or I would say like once you're about eight weeks out from the race at that point it's like whatever I usually like to look at, like, what is what do you have available? Because if you don't like it if someone else has it, if we determine 12 hours per week is best, but the person only has ten, there's no reason to force 12 because there's a path forward with ten. And 12 is not going to be sustainable, and it's probably going to introduce a bunch of extra stress that we don't want to have to manage. And that could possibly make what looks better on paper not actually better in practice. Got it. So what I usually like to do at that point is we just kind of sit down and we chat about, okay, what is a framework of availability that you have that we can work with and then we build from there. So the reason why it's that kind of loose is because the inputs we can use at that point are so low intensity. I'm not nearly as worried about ramping things up to a degree where, okay, we really overshot your tolerability to this. Because at that point we'll remove most and sometimes all intensity and start favoring things as specific to race pace. This is actually one of the bigger mistakes I think people make in ultrarunning is they get to this phase of training, and they do the actual program in terms of what the volume suggests, but they have a mismatch at intensity. Got it. So they're like, oh wow. My plan just went way up in volume. And they're like, okay, here we go. And they just try to run all of it. And then when we look at what their goal race pace is, it's like you could have been hiking like four of those 12 hours and it would have matched your race profile a lot better. And instead they're kind of driving themselves on their ground trying to run 12. Yeah. Not recovering. It's so easy to slip into that marathon mentality of like, you have to run faster. And yeah, I constantly reminded myself that no majority of what I'm going to be doing is like slow pace walking through the mountains. Well, and I see that this debate is pretty popular within ultrarunning, too, where it's like, how do you structure your long run? And I mean, there's there's there's polar ends of that where there are people that are like out doing like eight plus hour sessions and then there's people who are like, oh, you never need to go above two, three hours, because that's where like a lot of the adaptation curve is going to start to plateau, where any additional input is going to be such a low value, add that you're likely stealing from tomorrow, so you're better off focusing on total volume. And by exceeding that duration, you're taking future volume off and actually doing less. Yeah. And I mean, there's truths in both of those. It's like there's specifics within an eight hour session that you can't do in a three hour session. Or you could you're just not going to get to that, like kind of ebb and flow of, okay, I just hit a low point and then I got through it. Now I feel great. I hit a low point, okay, now I feel great. And sometimes having that experience can be so valuable because then you hit that on race day and you're like, oh, this isn't the end. This is just part of the phase, and I'll get through it. But then there is like, you do want to be in a position where like you're you're at a point where you can kind of afford the opportunity cost of putting a session like that on the training plan. So where I see a lot of people going wrong, maybe it is like, they'll do, they'll do, they'll favor that longer session side of things because that's kind of one of the draws a lot of times with ultrarunning these long days. Yeah. And they'll be too aggressive with them. So then they are stealing from future workouts because they're doing too much running and not enough hiking. Yeah. And yeah. So like let's say for example, let's take you for example, let's say you came to me and you said, all right, just due to the nature of things that are going on here, I only have this much time and it's on the lower end of what we would normally do. We're just going to do more running, because that is going to drive a stronger adaptation, and walking is going to be something you're going to be able to do. You're going to be able to do better with less input on that than you will running. So we want to focus on the one that's going to be more conducive with a shorter time or a limited time frame, versus you said like, oh, I'm just like, it's just like, let's say you decide to move out to a cabin. It's just going to be you and the woods. You have nothing but training. I was like, okay, well, we're going to like to do a ton of hiking. Yeah, because it's going to be useful. It's going to be low impact. It's not going to break you down nearly as fast. And it's a valuable enough skill set there that we can practice it without worrying about your weight vest up. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I think there's, I think there's more than one path forward that yields pretty good results. So then like whatever marginal difference you're going to see at a population level from doing one versus the other is going to probably be small enough where the interruption in whatever works for them with work, family, social life, everything that kind of makes them still enjoy the sport, essentially, yeah, is likely going to overshadow, you know, whatever marginal gain you're going to get from taking like this approach versus that approach, as long as it's not deviating so far from like doing something. Yeah. So I think it's worth repeating because I need to hear it just as much as I used to tell all of my patients that I don't need to go to the extremes of running ten hours as training. Yes. No, most people don't like physiologically. It's not necessarily something that is even on the table for a lot. I would say like I think like. Really what we're looking at is we're looking at cumulative volume over the course of the training plan as the real big mover. So like the hard part with the way people usually view these things that can be kind of stressful is like they'll see like a bigger session, like one of the larger sessions. And they put a lot of emphasis on that one session, when in reality, even if you did do an 8 hour or 10 hour session, if you looked at the amount of volume that is compared to everything you did from when you started to the end, it's a drop in the bucket. Doing two hours a day is going to get you way further. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Hours one day. Yep yep. Yeah. So yeah I think there's like I try to avoid an either or stuff with that because I think like there's things that you learn from an eight hour session that you don't learn from a two hour session. There's costs of doing an eight hour session that aren't there when you're doing two hour sessions. So it's like when you have a scenario like that, I tend to not say like, this is a no go zone. I tend to think this is a situational thing, like, okay, where who's going to benefit from the eight versus who's going to benefit from the two, who's going to benefit from some combination of that? Because sometimes it's just as simple as, oh, well, I can't do long sessions all the time, but there's these three weekends where, you know, like, I'm going to this training camp or my family's out of town. I got extra time and it's like, well, let's just take advantage of those and have you do something very specific to what you're doing at Javelina. So like put a limit on, just, you know, not going any faster on average than you will at Javelina, which is 100 miles. Most people, I think I mean, that's really slow for most people. Yeah. Because it's just, you know, like here's an example. Like a lot of people have this, like this goal of breaking 24 hours for 100 miles. It's like you're looking at just under 15 minute mile pace for that. So, you know, most of those people have those goals of breaking 24 hours. If they went off for an easy run, it'd be much faster than 15 minute mile pace or 14 minute mile pace. So if I structure it like a race specific weekend for them, I want them to be averaging much closer to that 14-15 minute mile pace. Then they would just they're easy run. Yeah. So if that means like oh well when I'm running it feels really comfortable to run at, let's just say a ten minute mile pace. I want you to be doing enough hiking in that. So we're pulling that average back towards 1415. So when you finish that run, that's what the data says versus got it. And balances. You can really unpack it further too, because I'd rather have them do it in a way where it's like, let's say it's a five hour session and they do like 3.5 hours of running, and then they just walk the last hour and a half. Yeah, you can do that. But I would rather them kind of have it more integrated within where they're doing like intervals essentially. That's a really good thing for me to hear, because I think the last time was two times ago on my three hour run. Like me, I purposely tried to not walk at all, and I got burnt out by like 215 and I had to walk home. Yeah. I was like, oh, I'm still getting my time in, right? Right. Yeah. So like now I'll change that strategy up. And saying these numbers actually is super helpful too, because I have been really keeping track of elevation change and walking statistics of how fast I'm actually going. And even with hills and stuff like that I'm averaging on a walking pace just over 16 miles. or six 60 minute miles. so I know. So now you're saying that makes me realize how much better I am doing than I really thought I was doing? Yeah. Like, oh, I could walk this whole darn thing and. Yeah, you know, just run occasionally and probably be just fine. Well, if you employ that early in the race, it pays so much dividends at the end because I see so many people at 100 milers, they end up doing more walking than they would have. But it's because they did way too much running in the beginning, and they got to a point where walking was the only thing left. It was like, it's like a grand version of what you described with that three hour run. Yeah. It's like they get to mile 70 and they've already used up their run quota. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, this is going to be a long 30 miles. Yeah. So like everyone's been there. So it's like it's not something that's like, you know, it's like if most people have done these a bunch of times they've found themselves in that situation. Sometimes it's, you know, like self-inflicted. Other times it's like, oh, you know what? I hit a standard and the next goal was maybe just a little bit of a reach. And I blew up and that was my reality that day. But yeah, when you can kind of be patient early and walk when you don't feel like you need to, but you know, it fits kind of the ratios of running and walking that's going to hit the splits you're trying to get to. Yeah. When you get to that, what will be the last lap at Javelina or last lap and a half? You're going to find you're still able to run for those same amount of periods of time as you were in the beginning, on the first lap. Yeah. Whereas the person who goes out and does too much running, you know, they're going to be the person that's, oh, I'm walking down this gradual because Javelina, there's this spot where you get to the midway aid station and then it's just this really smooth, gradual descent where it's not steep enough, where you feel awkward going down it. It's just enough where you feel like, oh, if I'm running, I'm just naturally going 15 20s per mile faster than I normally would, because gravity is my friend here, but it's not so steep that you're just getting hammered eccentrically the way you would if it was. Is like a 10% decline. And then there's like a skill set involved with it. So it's like you want to have yourself in a position where you can take advantage of those sections of the course versus having to walk down them because you've just blown up. Maybe we maybe we do a separate podcast on this then because, like, I have a lot of questions of looking at the course, data, you know, elevation change and coming up with that strategy of, you know, like when to walk versus and, and pre-planning, just like a race car driver of knowing all the turns, right. Like knowing where all the hills are for my first lap, you have the experience of running up multiple times, but I'll have the experience after my first lap running on it. but maybe pre pre checking that or like looking at that now and yeah. Yeah that would be interesting. The thing about Javelina that is interesting is it sort of does skew towards doing a little more. It skews away from like a real perfect run walk ratio because you do have like the spot from. So the way it's set up is the the loop is like about little over 19 miles. So then the first loop they add this little extra like two, two and a half mile stretch. Just your kind of makeup makes the difference okay. But after that it's just the same loop. 19.1 or something, 0.2 miles or something like that. And you sort of start off on kind of just like these little rolling type of trails, pretty flat. if you went out there and just did that for miles, you could run the whole thing. It wouldn't. There would be no spot where it was like for a four mile run. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna have to hike this. You could do it, no problem. So that spot, I think, like there's some spots where, like that spot, you can actually probably run a run walk ratio pretty strict to your, your pacing goals. Then you hit the first aid station and it's like this 6.6 mile climb. I say climb loosely. It's just the steepest spot of the course, but relatively speaking, it's really not steep. but it's uphill, so it's net uphill from that aid station to that top part, and through that section, you're going to want to skew a lot more towards walking than running than you would on average. Then you get up to the middle aid station, and from there that's at such. I was just talking about where you have like six, five and a half mile downhill section that's just so buttery smooth, nice, like no rocks, gradual decline, and it just feels like it just feels like everything is coming a little bit easier than normal. So in that stretch, I think there is an incentive to kind of look at it through. Okay. Through this stretch, I'm going to do a little more running and a little less walking than I normally would, and let that kind of really kind of tame downhill do its thing where you're going to get a little more value from that running than walking. but not so much that you're just, you know, bombing down it and blowing your quads out doing that either. But thinking of it in the sense like, okay, for this stretch, maybe I'm going to do twice as much running than walking. Then what I normally would do versus the uphill section, maybe I'm gonna do twice as much walking. As running than what I would normally do. And then you go through the last aid station before the start. And that next stretch is a little more predictable in terms of like you can kind of just run your normal run walk ratios of what will get you to your average pace. And it's going to play out a little more specifically because there's like small little ups that will make sense to walk in small little downs. It'll make more sense to run. And they're pretty obvious ones. Yeah. Yeah okay. The, the, the sleeper inclines are always the one that are the most brutal. Or you can't really quite tell that you're going up an incline. Right. But you're really going up a big incline in your heart rate elevating before you even know it. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. So I mean that's kind of like the overview of the Javelina loop. You know, it's interesting like depending on how early you head out that way, if you get out there early enough, then it wouldn't be a terrible idea to just do the loop once for, like, one of your long runs because you've seen the whole course, then, you know, you've seen the whole course, and then it's like you have a map in your head of, okay, this is maybe how this is going to fit and feel and you have some data too. So you're like, oh, when I kind of really pull back on running to hike on that 6.6 mile stretch. This is kind of what my pace average is. And then if I get a little more liberal with the amount of running I normally would do on that smooth downhill stretch, this is why pace comes out and you can start looking at numbers and what's kind of reasonable targets for that. Okay. and get maybe a little closer to being able to predict what your goal time should be and what places you should try to be hitting from one aid station to the next and that sort of stuff. Well, I know my own answer to this following question is that it would be fun to go out there like in September and yeah, like a Corning. is that like typically recommended? Like, should we plan on me going out for a week or two? You, yeah. I mean, I think it'd be a value add. Okay. Sure. Yeah. I don't. I don't see a scenario where it would be a bad idea unless it was, like, super disruptive, really hot. So, like. Yeah, that's the benefits and disadvantages as well. But for sure. Yeah. It'll be warmer when you do that than it will be on race day. So, we would want to just take that into account where we would assume that, generally speaking, you're going to have a little less of a hurdle from the weather in most cases versus what you'll see on that training week. But we'll also be doing one loop versus five. So. Right. Yeah, to some degree I'd rather have it that way because then you're like, it's more likely to feel like as difficult as it will at certain points on that training run then, than it would if it were like just a perfect 65 degrees and yeah, like easier than it will be on race day, although it might average out because if you went out, let's say you went out there in September and got up kind of early and did the loop where the first couple hours it was still like just, you know, barely light out. You know, the weather might match a little closer to what the middle of the day will be at the on the race to then. Okay. So, yeah, there's, there's you can you can, you can hack the desert a little bit easier than you can. Because there's no humidity. Yeah, this is super funny. and in general, what are people's thoughts around that in the racing community? Is that considered cheating, like in the, in the oh, to go on the course early. Yeah. And in the analogy being in the hiking world, like if you, if you grab water from a water fountain on your path, like, oh, some people who are purist and hiking, they frown upon that, like, you're not doing the real hike. Yeah. like, what is the racing I would say about that in ultrarunning? I think people would see that as just like taking advantage of your opportunities if you can get out of the course. So yeah, I mean, it's gotten the sports kind of competitive now where like some of the pros, if they're doing a race that's like one of the primary races, they'll move out by the course and do their entire training on the course that I knew from a pro level, it just yeah, yeah, it's just, you know, everyday Joe Schmo like me. Yeah. Well, here's a good example. So Western States 100. They do. I think they got one of the best setups in terms of getting people sort of aware of the course and getting some specific training. And they do this Memorial weekend. or is it no Labor Day weekend? no Memorial memorial? weekend. training. run. It's a three day stretch where they'll go Saturday, Sunday, Monday. And they do. They start at mile 30 on the course. You can't get on the first 30 miles. Like that's the interesting about western states is the snow kind of makes like nobody knows interesting because they can't get on it until sometimes like well in some years there's like like one year there were 17 miles of snow on the trail still. So like there's sometimes it's not even gone on race day, but like, nobody's really doing great recon. Certainly not specific to what it will be like on race day early. So you're sort of left with this scenario where there's like 30 miles of nebulousness, like we don't really know what we're going to get. And then there's like 70 miles where the terrain is going to be very predictable. The heat can range quite a bit from one year to the next. But they do this training camp there where you start at mile 30, you do like a full 50 K basically the first day through like the canyon section. The next day you do this section from where the canyons end down to this river spot, and then the last day you go from the river spot to the finish line. So in three days you get two thirds, little over two thirds of the course done. You see most of it. And like most people who do, Western states are going to get a huge value add from going out and doing that that weekend. And that's like a very like accepted approach to go about things. Yeah. Well, it's pervasive across all the other sports. It's like such an interesting concept of you always want to visualize, you always want to go prepare as much as possible. And but there's certain sports that like if the if it's not the newness like the first time you're on the course, you're cheating. Yeah. Well, I think in your situation too, like if you went and did a loop, we would, we would just know certain things. We'd be able to kind of like, like, tighten the bands of what is too conservative and too aggressive. Got it. Because like, if you're going up that let's say you take that 6.6 mile stretch if. You're going up that and you're just like, okay, on one loop, I feel compelled to hike half of this. Well, then we know that there's no reason for you on that first loop to be doing any more than that. Yeah. So if you're exceeding that, we know we're probably stealing from later in the race. Well, and this is all perfect timing too, because, literally the hour before we came here for the podcast, my wife, popped up a thing on Facebook Marketplace, of course, and she's been addicted at looking at campers for the past. Oh, yeah. And she's like, we need to get this on. This is it. Yeah. And I was like, okay, let's do it. And it's with the thought process of doing some additional training, but also like, I'm thinking of going out two weeks early to the race. And, we have family out there and we want to visit them and, and that kind of fun stuff. So you can camp right at the start finish spot of where the loop is. That's what. Yeah. If you pull up an RV or a camper, you can just set up there if you want it to. Yeah. And that's that's what I saw. And it seems like, I mean, during races, it, that seems like such a cool community. I'm, I'm super excited for my whole family. Oh, they're going to love it. Yeah. I've got a whole bunch of friends that want to come camp and stuff like that, but, I didn't know that it was available all the time, so that's. That's really cool. Yeah, there's there's probably no better race to just go and hang out at if you're not running it cool. And as a runner, sometimes you're thinking about it. You're like, okay, have these people come and helping me? Like, how bored are they going to be? Yeah, well, that's exactly it. Yeah, I've got a yeah, I've got a person coming with a camera. I've got. Yeah. I have some families that are, emergency room nurses that are going to come help. Yeah. You know, like, everyone wants to pitch in a little bit. And I guess this will be an open invite for people on the podcast as well. Hey, you want to come hang out with doctor? Check it out. Yeah. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a party for sure. Down at the start finish. They keep things hopping the whole time. That's awesome. Yeah. Super cool. You could easily stay up the whole time if you're just hanging out and just. They'd be doing different things over the course of the day. They've gotten pretty, like, built out, like they have, they have like games that people will play during the race too. Like they have like a little, like section where there's like, beanbag toss and stuff like that. And the party. Yeah, it is. And then I mean, they have like, I mean, they have different like vendors for like, food and coffee and stuff like that too. And it's actually kind of nice. You this has gotten a little more difficult because parking has gotten a little more congested there, just due to the amount of people to do it now. But like you, I mean, there's like a grocery store that's like a 20 minute drive away that once your runner leaves for their next loop, you've got like you can zip over quite a bit of time before they're coming through again. Go grab ice and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So yeah, it's set a pretty nice. So very cool. Your family and friends will we'll have a good time. Yeah. That's that's what I'm hoping. Yeah. And especially if we get this camper, it'll be, we love tent camping, but, you know, there's just something so value added when you have a pop up camper where you can easily set up a kitchen and no doubt, kind of fun stuff. So. Yeah. Yeah. And you're no stranger to that. So yeah. Exactly. Right in. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Dave. Well, it's been fun, I think. What is this the third time we've caught up on the podcast. So. Yes. Well, hopefully, hopefully listeners will enjoy this one. And, I'm sure we'll do a few more before I share the podcast around. Come on and spread the word. Yeah, we're going to get some promos out there. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Dave. Well, where can people find you if they're interested in checking in? Yeah. Mind of dave.com. And that's got all my links to different things. I've, I've relaunching my podcast. So I'm excited that you're going to be a guest on that. Yeah. Well, we'll announce that, and, yeah, I've got my own genetic testing company now that people can buy genetic tests through, all of that stuff is listed on the mind of Dave. Com. Awesome. Well, thanks again for stopping by. Yeah. Perfect. Take care.