David Roche is an elite ultramarathon athlete, and coach. He recently rebroke his own course record at the Leadville 100 Mile. David has been a big advocate for not just high carbohydrate consumption, but has challenged the limitations of very high in race carbohydrate consumption and what it can do for performance.
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Episode Transcript:
Alright, David, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Zach. I just admire you so much. I'm probably gonna be rambling throughout this episode. I'll make sure the listeners don't have to deal with too much of it, but just love how open minded you are. You're one of the best athletes in the world. Can't wait. I appreciate it. It's really hard to believe it's been a year since you came on last after crushing Leadville, and then now you're back on after crushing Leadville again, maybe further solidifying your approach to that course and the strategies that go into all of it. So I want to chat a little bit about that, but also dive into kind of your fueling strategy, some high carb input stuff and things like that, and maybe learn a little bit from you as, as the king of the carbs, as they say. I think they say that I love that. That's what I want on my tombstone. That'll be delightful. He exceeded any logical threshold of carbohydrate consumption. Here he lies. Something like that. Maybe. Bam! Let's do it. Awesome. How's your recovery? I'm guessing is well on his way after Leadville. You're feeling pretty good. Yeah. So we're recording this a little over four weeks after four and a half weeks. It feels fantastic. Actually, one of the big interventions I made this year was based on a study that came out in April, which usually I'm not the type of guy that's, oh, study and then do something. But this was a little bit of a different situation because it tracked two athletes who finished 32 hours in the Wasatch 100, but it looked at their metabolic rate for seven days after the race. So like within the race, obviously they burn a ton of calories and carbs. But then after two and their resting metabolic rate was two times elevated seven days post race. And the researchers put these numbers on paper to indicate these athletes, even though they're not doing anything, need massive calorie totals to recover. And so this year, after Leadville, I basically trained like I was doing a long run every day, even as I was like, shut down five days later, which I know intuitively, but seeing numbers on it made a huge difference. And yeah, my recovery rate has been way better than I've ever felt before. So the rare instance where I think study directly informs practice. Yeah, I saw that study. I think I actually saw it on Instagram. I want to say one of the researchers was posting it there, and I thought that was really interesting because, yeah, to the degree that to the degree that you're going to be, I think we all intuitively know, like, all right, after 100 mile race, I should probably eat a lot for a couple of days to catch up. But you're not just catching up. You're also, like you said, possibly to your resting metabolic rate, which is going to be similar to what you would normally eat on an active training week in a lot of cases. And yeah, that's a lot of food to be considering when you're not necessarily in that same space in your head. Maybe. Okay, I did that workout. I better eat more and yeah, in a week. It's pretty crazy to think about that. It's got that long of a tail, especially because you're also making up for the deficit accrued during the race, which is huge. So that's not even then. That's on top of the RMR changes like the resting metabolic rate. Yeah. So I applied that, came back. Bite numbers came back way more quickly than they usually do. That's the main place I saw it, because I think running is sometimes a little bit more wishy washy, where so many variables go into it that you can't really tell what's what and where you're at. But biking is just a numbers game. And yeah, recovery is also, I think just because last year's Leadville was my very first 100. And now that I've done that, Javelina DNF Western states, I've had enough longer efforts that I've just some longer term nervous system adaptations. Plus, I think I treated my body better this year at Leadville and was able to cross the finish line feeling really good. That went a long way too. Yeah. Yeah. Did you do anything different nutritionally at Leadville this year? I know you were very high in carbohydrates, but did I think if I remember correctly the first time, you were also very high in caffeine? Was that olive on the table still lower caffeine this time? These are the ways I approach caffeine in races: I have a general feel for what I want to do, but then go on feeling. So I don't dose caffeine too much preemptively. It's more based on when you get a little fuzzy feeling or a little lower motivation or anything like that. And I just felt fantastic. So I started, I maybe did 400 to 600mg as opposed to that way too much I did last year. And then carb wise, I did more this year than last year, just knowing what I can handle. So I was up around 150 for the grams per hour for the first ten hours of the race, and then dial back subsequently. Yeah. The other interesting thing, I've seen with some of the stuff that gets reported, I think Western states probably do the best job I've seen of this, because we just get I think it was maybe 2 or 3 years ago. They had all top ten men, and I think maybe 6 or 7 of the women that published their fueling. And there was that trend of first, we were getting higher in general than what we had seen in the past. But also there was that sort of front loading effect where people were maybe pulling back a little bit near the end. Is that just when you're noticing a little more gut like Processing stuff. So you're just intuitively saying, all right, that it's not going on quite as smoothly as it was the first ten hours. I'm probably okay pulling back and not puking some of this up. So that's a big part of it. But the question is what drives that, whether that's just accumulated stress or lower output. And that's probably you mean the main source is just every 100 miler is a fast 50 miler at the top level nowadays a fast 50 miler followed by like attrition. My heart rate data is all shared on Leadville and I was pushing as hard as I could. But you're even before the heart rate suppression happened at the end, I was in my 30s, and at that point, one 50g per hour is just way too much when I'm in my zone one essentially, that's like the governor. I think that sometimes people miss that high carbs only work with hard effort or high effort. High carb doesn't work with low effort though. Maybe on the bike you could do that. The astronomical numbers we're seeing are not ultrarunning, where there's some jarring in the efforts lower. It's in Ironman triathlons where we're cycling or whatever, where the wattage is so high, the power output is so high constantly. And that's where we saw one 82g per hour at the Ironman World Championships, like just these insane numbers. But we're also seeing that in road cycling. And that's because they're maintaining very high power throughout the event. So if we ever see really high stuff in ultrarunning, we'll probably see it more in 6 to 8 hour events rather than a 15 hour event like Leadville or a hot event like Western States. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what that would do for the 150 mile like records and some of the more popular courses around those distances and things like that, or even like a race like comrades, to the degree that who knows what they're feeling at most of the top finishers at comrades. Are South Africans still? So it's I don't know how often that data gets published at all, so that would be a great race for it, though, when you think of just like the winning guys are running like 545 on a hilly road, it's like you're putting up a lot of workload at that point. So yeah, it's starting to touch everything. I don't have that many years left, I assume at the top level. But one of the things if I recover well from Javelina this year is I really want to do a world record attempt, because the I think that there's still so much meat on those bones because of the high carb, right? Not because I'm better. I'm not better than anybody. But I think that as soon as the same cycling principles get applied there, like we're going to see the same things we've seen in cycling, just because the physiology there is even more obvious than in hundreds and hundreds. Some people can operate on such low effort levels on certain courses that Carb needs are not that high. No one's ever going to beat my time at Leadville without high carb, because it's such a fast race at times that you need, you're going to need to push unless you're even if you're a two, 10 or 208 marathon or you're going to need to push. But there are mountain courses where that doesn't apply. The world record type stuff is all high effort. That's going to change, and you're seeing it in shorter events, too. I've. I coached Jess McClain, who just finished eighth at the World Championships in the marathon, and probably a lot of her growth has been high carb. At Boston this year, she was over 100g per hour, and she's a small person at very high effort levels, and she ran 222 for top American on a tough course in that. And so it's starting to interact with physiology across the board and running. And it's super exciting because I think it's also going to change training theory with it. Yeah, I was going to ask you about Jess, because I knew you had been working with her and were getting into that distance where fuelling is still obviously a piece to the puzzle, but maybe not to the same degree from a smaller amount. I guess the way to maybe look at it, it'd be like your your internal reserves are just going to be a little higher percentage of what you could possibly get away with versus a Leadville. That's a very tiny fuel tank. But then you ratchet up intensity closer to lactate threshold, and now all of a sudden, two hours and 20 minutes, you're going to have some car, but you're saying she's up at 100 plus grams per hour, even during a marathon? Yeah, she's 1051 ten. That's a very small person. The counterintuitive part of this is that in road marathons probably matters less for Jess than it does for your 3.5 hour marathon, or for that exact reason you talked about, is if that 3.5 hour marathoner is pushing to the top of their potential at that moment, they have they're operating on a lower tank of reserves to begin with, or a lower tank to access later on. Yeah, I think as the longer you go, the more it matters. But the wild part of this equation is it's not just a glycogen reserve tank. The most eye opening question to me was the Olympics in the mountain bike, which is a one hour event, and I saw an athlete. The athlete that won the gold medal for women taking a gel six minutes before the finish after taking the. Okay. Like you're seeing that across the board when there's tons of data even in these short events. And so, yeah, probably it has a lot to do with the nervous system and how the brain regulates performance more even than how the body responds, which is like the biggest frustrating thing, like following some of the lower carb zealots who say, well, you're not actually oxidizing those carbs you're taking in. It's not just an oxidation question, though. Clearly that plays a role. It's a nervous system question. And I think anybody who actually plays the game or coaches, athletes who play the game, like when you feel that first hand, it's just, oh my God. This is why the game is changing, but you kind of have to feel it sometimes, or really be empathetic to other people's experiences to truly understand why it's becoming such a movement beyond what seems reasonable from some of the current data that you might see in control studies. Yeah. I was going to ask you about that when you were. And I do want to get in kind of your transition into this in terms of just what you did to there's steps, I'm assuming to get to 150g per hour is I can appreciate this is going to be hard to quantify, but was there some sort of like trend where you're like, okay, when I do 60, I feel like this, but I get a little bit of extra when I go to 7080. Is it a pretty noticeable as you increase, or is there like a because I think of it like with, like with training where you get like a lot of progress up to say maybe 70 miles and then you get some more progress from 70 to 100, but it's not going to be as free of a an exchange as it was. And then you start getting a little riskier as you go beyond that, where you're paying quite a bit for some small returns. Yeah. Is it similar to that with adding more carbohydrate, or are you getting more of a linear like? The more I can get in, the better I feel, and it just keeps going up. Yeah, definitely. The dose response relationship is very individual and it follows some sort of you're going to hit an asymptote probably. And the question that I find is that you whole you whole wholly shift the curve like upward shift the curve of that asymptote when you realize this is just letting me push harder. And when you view it like that. So my personal experience with it is I thought, so I went to college to play football. I was a big guy and endurance was never my forte at baseline. It took me a long time to work into all these sports, and eventually when I found my way to 50 K after eight years of running, I got to the finish line cramping, feeling terrible. And that was my experience in 50 cases where I had some success, but every single 50 K I could not have imagined going 51 K and then took a break from racing at a very top level, even though I was training really hard all the time because I didn't want to raise athletes, I coached professional male athletes. I coached from 2016 to 2023. And Megan was like. David, you got to race. You're getting older. Like you're never going to have a shot unless you do it now. I got over my weirdness with athletes and then from there, like, started doing some longer ultras. And by then high carb had hit the cycling peloton. It has hit my coaching as much as I can, but not the extremely high carb. And just at the beginning, like 75g. Like, that's the, I think, the beginning of the high carb funnel. All of a sudden I was like, oh, I do have some endurance to call on. And then at 90g, I'm like, all right, I stop cramping up as much at 100g, 115, 120. I'm like, I don't cramp at all anymore. And then at 120 plus, I'm like, I can push hard. I can run 550 miles at the start of the Leadville 100 and be okay. And basically for people out there that are wondering if 75g is where it starts on harder efforts, none of this is saying do this on easy days or like random training days, and that will get you probably 80% of the way there for most people. And that's I say most people can probably stop at 75 and not sweat it. And 90 is like the peak, like the absolute max. And if you go above 90, you probably need to also not just be pushing hard, but also have higher output. Like you probably don't want to be doing 120 at 12 minute miles for the same reason that cyclists wouldn't do that at 150W, even if 150W is their functional threshold power. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I think it is interesting when you start looking at just workload and what that ends up like looking and the control events are fun with that too, because you get if you run a steady enough race or a relatively steady enough race, the it almost gets easier because now you're applying these numbers to something that's very consistent versus of course, like Leadville, where you've got stretches of downhill stretches of uphill and pacing gets a little more pace per mile, gets a little murky in there in terms of what you're actually producing from a metabolic standpoint. But yeah, that's really helpful. I know, like when I've been doing high carb now I think I'm on week 11 of just like the dietary shift. And I've done enough long runs now to where I've been hitting a lot of that carbohydrate during the longer runs, and I'm getting up to 80 to 100g in some of those and 2 to 3 hours. So the big question is, is it okay, that's great. But can you keep doing that for ten, 11, 12 hours? And hopefully the answer is yes. But I suspect it's something that takes a lot of work and practice in terms of just getting myself digestive ready for that. So I cut you off. I know most of your listeners understand that, and I've read your articles on it, but just so if people are coming into this and this is their first exposure to it, how have you noticed the shift or in those runs? How has it felt for you? Yeah, yeah. So I would say I can give you kind of a little breakdown of just how everything is felt with it so far, because you might be interested or have some feedback for me, just in general. But I would say if a couple things really were interesting right out the gate, I started sleeping like 30 to 60 minutes per night less, but no sign of oh, I'm struggling because of it. It wasn't like, oh, I can't sleep and I want to sleep. It was like, I'm just getting up earlier and ready to start. Caffeine consumption came down about half of what I was taking in before. For whatever reason. It was just like my typical routine prior. I'd have a cup of coffee before my morning workout and then come back in the afternoon, and then I'd have another cup of coffee, like in the late morning. And now it's like I have that first cup of coffee with probably about 60 to 70% the amount of caffeine in it than it would before. And then I'm just done. I don't even touch it for the rest of the day. I have no desire to either. In fact, it seems undesirable to add another stimulant into the mix. So that's been two things that I'm seeing as pretty big positives with the way I've been describing it. Performance feels better pretty much across the board from like, easy runs all the way up to like short intervals. And I've got really good data on some of the short interval stuff that I can compare to the most, like eye opening. One is I have this hill that I'll use for hill intervals, and it's about a quarter mile long. It's a 9 to 10% incline. And I've just done, I think I've done almost 200 reps on that from workouts over the last few years. I did an eight by that hill, and I had my eight fastest reps up that hill, not one of them being my fastest. All eight of them are faster than my prior fastest one, and I only do that workout on perceived effort. I don't watch data while I'm doing it. I just go and I say, okay, this is the effort I'm hitting for this one. And then I dial it up and I go and look at the data afterwards. So like that was a pretty big eye opener. The interesting thing I find too is that low carbs are really durable in the sense that like my perceived effort and my pace doesn't change much, where once I get into it, it's okay, I can expect what's going to happen, and it's really predictable. And any change is like a really slow degradation. Whereas with high carb I feel like it's just a lot more touchy. So like, I feel like maybe an urge to run faster than I'd want to at times, and I have to make sure I'm okay. The goal here is to be here. Don't go faster than that, or all of a sudden I'll be like, oh, I feel like I'm working way harder at the same pace. And some of that's just, I think the fueling demand inputs to where if the runs long enough or hard enough, if my perceived effort starts rising at a given pace. And so, yeah, I hit a gel and then it usually goes away. Or the other one I notice on shorter runs, if I get that, if I do just like a stride, it usually recalibrates then to what it would be like. That would be the kind of the general take I've had on it so far. I haven't done anything beyond three hours yet. So in terms of just testing how my guts are going to respond to it with the fueling input, that's unknown. But hopefully I guess I'm doing 12 hours on October 25th, so I'll get a really good look at how that spans out to a longer duration at that point. So I think the tricky part of being a devil's advocate against my own position is that your fat oxidation rate is going to be sky high for the rest of your life, I can tell you. You think I'm going to maintain that? Oh yeah. I haven't been to a lab to measure it, but my oxidation rates are sky high. And so that's the complicated thing is, usually when athletes train adequately they have good fat oxidation rates. You have pushed that to another level right. Like beyond that. But then that does seem like it is durable and lasts a long time. So I think you're going to get the best of all worlds. It's going to be freaking awesome. But similarly, I came of age in the low carb era. It's not like I didn't do any concerted low carb, but I did plenty of runs where I just went out and ran and I never thought about any of this stuff. I don't know if I ever had a gel for the first like 6 or 8 years of my running. And so I think for male athletes in particular, that can be a tricky element because that oxidation rates are trainable and do move. And for female athletes, the risk of low carb is so high that you have to be way more careful because like female athletes get destroyed. Male athletes are much more durable with that because the endocrine system is less touchy and less at risk. But that's the one place that I think some complications can arise. Yeah. Yeah. So do you think so? I'm gonna have to go in and get my fat oxidation rate. Say I'm getting a blood draw done. I think next Friday too because I'm gonna be curious to see what that looks like as well, just in general. More so due to the fact that I'm doing this with certain food groups. Right? Like I'm eating like I'm trying to get high carb, but I'm not being super picky about what that means. But there's probably optimization I can do within that where it's maybe if you're low on this, eat that instead of that sort of a thing just to get an idea there. But yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see like the fat oxidation rates and see, I assume they've dipped to some degree just based on the dietary shift. But yeah, maybe I retain more. And I'm still pretty high, relatively speaking, compared to the average endurance athlete. Oh for sure. And they don't need to be that high. Like they just need to be high enough. And I think that the part that it's just the uncomfortable conversation that the low carb people don't have is like fat oxidation rates mostly. And what we're talking about there is just aerobic fitness. And so a lot of people that come into this, it's not that bitter top at the end of the sport. It's people that are just not training enough. You train a little bit more and you don't have to hack your nutrition. You can eat. And that's not to say that there's not a place for lower carb at times like this for me, it's always a training discussion, not a life discussion. And I think a lot of athletes listen to this that aren't like trying to set hundred mile records or whatever for them. It's outside of training. Like in your evening or whatever. You can totally practice that and that's okay. We're not trying to have it constantly full glycogen all the time. And you're fighting because the study just came out on glycogen loss and replenishment, which had athletes due to our protocols on the bike where they're glycogen depleting, where there's two hours of two minute intervals essentially to basically failure, very hard stuff. And then one group did ten grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight. So huge carb totals afterwards in the 12 hours. And one group did a placebo. And even the group that did 10g/kg of body weight did not replenish their muscle glycogen in 12 hours. Which points out why elite athletes? It's okay outside of training, high carb makes a huge difference too, because you're training all the time. Otherwise you'd be at zero constantly as that adds up. Yeah, but for everybody else, some of that matters. But I'm not one that's thrown the baby out with the bathwater. There are health thoughts that go outside of just the training context, but while training you burn the shit and that's good. Yeah, yeah. And so basically, I think sometimes you're right, you're gonna talk about type two diabetes. It's not that it's not at all backed by science. The problem is like if people tell me that high carb is saying, now go eat Pixy Stix for 14 hours of your day outside of training after your four mile run. It's not like that at all. You have to compare similar populations when you're talking about that stuff, I think. Yeah, it is interesting. Did you look at that study? I think it was probably almost a year and a half ago where they had. I was just curious what your thoughts were. I think it was either 10 or 20 endurance athletes. I think they described them as elite athletes, which I think we get really weird with definitions in this because if you think of like sport elite athletes, like none of these individuals were training at any caliber like what we'd see at the World Championships right now. But relative to the average person, they were probably training quite a bit. I think it was like maybe something in the neighborhood of 30 or 40 miles per week or something like that. And three out of the ten participants on the high carb without weight gain had pre-diabetic levels of fasting blood glucose level. And I was following that conversation afterwards. And there was some interesting back and forth. And one was like, yeah, but not all pre-diabetic blood glucose levels actually turn into diabetes. There's like a percentage of the population that their baseline sort of is in that pre-diabetic range, and they just don't ever progress to anything dangerous. So that opens up a whole nother cancer. Even if we look at that study and take like the people who really buy into it. For their words. Say, okay, maybe three out of ten people are better off with a lower carb. Or maybe not, at least not a really high carbohydrate diet. We would have to square that with whatever percentage of the population maybe just stabilizes just fine at a little higher resting blood glucose level. Oh yeah, it's such a scientifically disingenuous argument. Unfortunately, when people start using resting blood glucose to make these types of determinations because when the body mobilizes glycogen constantly for training, it can cause slight transient elevations that do not have any subsequent effects on health and in fact, are probably associated with better health, because the alternative would be under fueling training and everything that bad that happens there. There's definitely overdoing it with at the core of all this, the principle is fuel the work you are doing, not over fuel the work you are doing. There's a place for over fueling and for elite athletes, there's no it's impossible to over fuel basically. And so that's why the conversation gets really simple when I talk to the professional. But if someone's doing 30 miles a week, it's still possible to over fuel the work you're doing by a ton. Yeah, I can do that easily. I'm huge . I love that stuff. And that's fine in moderation. But you're still human and we're still playing chemical equations. And so you need to be a little bit careful. But I think sometimes those conversations just get convoluted because if you look at the discussions online, I have stopped weighing in for the most part. Outside of on our podcast, where because they're just so disingenuous, you're talking to you're talking to you believers, to dogmatic presenters and data, which is why I love your approach. I think both of us are like, low carb is pretty magical at times, like what it can do to the body. And it has a the principles of it have a place, but that is not saying that it is a religious experience or dogma and oh my God, like there's this study that came out January, something like that this year. And it's been constantly they've received so much media attention to. And it was like the ten grams per hour study where it was maybe one of the least, like scientifically honest presentations of interpretations of data. The data itself is great, but we did a whole breakdown of it on our podcast, which we never do, where we're like, this is why this study is taking good data and turning it into and churning it through their belief system. Basically, it just showed that human metabolism is miraculously flexible, but metabolic flexibility does not indicate good health or peak performance. Yeah. My takeaway from that study was that even if you're on a strict ketogenic diet, some carbohydrate introduction is going to be worthwhile from a performance standpoint. Yeah. Like the opposite of that. Because like when I, when people reach out to me all the time about low carb ketogenic and some of them are like, not just low carb, like I was where I'm prioritizing some carbohydrate in their they're like strict keto and they're like 50g or less per day for a variety of different reasons. And generally not training anywhere near the capacity I am. But they're following that dietary approach and they want to know what I should eat on race day? And it's that study is at least ten grams of carbohydrate because we know that's going to move your performance. And then the other thing is like, what about 20g? What about 30g? What about 40g? And we get into that sort of murky water like you were talking about before, about what is the pace and the intensity and everything like that too. There's a nice follow up to that study that would look at these ketogenic runners and see maybe they get an even better bump by going up to 20g. We don't know, because they stopped at ten, because I'd be interested in that as well. And to give some information towards that. Yeah. And just simply we have this playing out in the real world all the time from not just the front of the packs. I get, what, ten messages a day from people that are like, oh my gosh, I always thought I couldn't go farther than whatever the distance is five K, 1050 miles, whatever. And all of a sudden these athletes are like, and now I just finished like a 200 mile or something crazy like that. I think it makes sense. I mean, if you just view it intuitively, this is all playing equations with how the body functions, and that is a great substrate, but it's a low intensity substrate and everyone out there, like it takes insane aerobic economy to be burning fat consistently. And to do it over ultras is especially difficult because the body starts substrate switching, even at very low effort levels, even for aerobically economical athletes, unless they're absolute beasts like Zach. And that's where that's a great example, actually, is Kilian Jornet. The only time this data has really been published is in YouTube 2022, where they measured him throughout the race at like halfway or maybe two thirds of the way they tracked him for blood lactate. Kilian, maybe one of the most aerobically efficient athletes that has ever lived, probably has fat oxidation that's higher than ever measured. His blood lactate levels were in the double digits, which is indicative of a metabolic framework that is heavily burning glucose like insanely burning glucose, even though he's, like going at a low effort and so economical. The point just being the body gets crazy in metabolic flexibility turns into just a shitstorm of creativity. And most of it requires carbs. Basically, no matter what you do in advance. Yeah, the killing stuff was interesting. I remember seeing that kind of role. He's interesting in general, too, because it seems like he is able to tolerate quite a bit of carbohydrate without maybe training his gut as much as someone like you do. Yeah. And he also takes in a ton of fat during races, like he'll do olive oil. It's why it's always hard to take data from the rest of the like, the outliers of the hours. And he was the chosen one from the time he was 16. And he said, it's sometimes all interesting. How does that apply to human physiology generally? And then also interesting, how is that just a goat being a goat? And yeah, that's most of what you are an individual to, that's most of what you are. And one reason that I think my story resonated a little bit is that people that have followed my journey understand that yes, I am gifted, but I have also it took me 18 years to have a breakthrough. This wasn't something that was as a football player, like it took time and as a result, it's like there's a little bit more of an analogy to someone that is a grinder that is trying to find every little way their body can adapt. And most likely my weakness relates to the GI system. Like, I assume that my ability to take in carbs is not just something that is trained, is probably something that is good for me, or that is my super skill, right? And it might even be related to that. I was a football player. I was £200 when I was young, so my body was taking in a lot of fuel and maybe if you put me in an ultrasound or autopsy me after I pass away and have that epitaph we talked about, you'd see a GI system that's made for an offensive lineman. Who knows? But basically, like, we all have our gifts. And I think that's why the high carb funnel doesn't start at 120. It starts at 75. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. Most people will see just insane benefits if you're listening out there. If you do 75g of carbs per hour and you've if you've been doing 40 is most people and you go double that. Yeah. It's just bonkers. Yeah, yeah. So when you get it. So when you come back to. Okay, I'm going to start focusing on racing again. And had you already been like all right. The way I'm going to do this is high carb or did you learn that once you started getting going again as okay, this is an input I'm going to really try to leverage. So just the unfortunate reality that I have is that coaching, I get to see all of this play out. I had seen athletes like winning the biggest races in the world with very high carb behind the scenes, and especially athletes who hadn't shown it before. Like Jess McLean, if she's a superstar, like this car, that data point. Instead, I'm talking about athletes that are good, but not national class or whatever, and then win a national championship, qualify for team USA. And I was seeing these anecdotes, anecdotes, and then the studies that were coming in and then talked to the professional cyclists and the professional cycling coaches, where this conversation has been done and dusted. Like no one's talking about it anymore. It's just such an obvious answer. And it's like, okay, clearly this is the thing. So when I started moving up in distance, it was with that in mind. But in my first Long Gulch I did at the canyon's 100 K, I had not adequately GI trained and went from first place to vomiting on the trail due to some logistical issues. But then also just like after that, I was like, oh, right on. This is an equation about how to make this intake tolerable, more now for me than the question of whether the intake is the right path. And so that's where the Jai training started to become a bigger part of it. And now I don't really need to do that much Jai training I think because I've adapted to it. But that was the initial thing. And then from there, basically every ultra I've done since has been awesome, except for like every longer. Ultra has been awesome except for western states, which was. Again, I learned the high carb lesson one more time, which had some GI issues which were caused by hydration errors and then had to back off carbs. And as soon as I backed off the carbs, it was like Superman lost all of his powers. It was like it was for me. It was another reminder of, oh shit, this literally is the source of everything I'm able to accomplish. Training too, and working hard. But like, without it, I am who I was that nothing changed. I'm just who I was. Plus high carb. Yeah, I think I found the Western States thing. Like, obviously I didn't find it funny that you had a rough day, but I thought it funny. The conversation afterwards is like it did come up. You got all it was just so public that you were going to hear everything that could possibly get said, and it was like, oh, maybe it does. Maybe this doesn't work, maybe that doesn't work. Maybe this approach is wrong. Let's just zoom out for a second here. And what's the expectation for the average ultra runner in terms of nailing a race? And I guess now we have hindsight of Leadville too. It's like you've nailed three out of 400 milers. That's a pretty good success rate. I'll take three out of four all day, every day. Have you told me all right, the next you're going to do 400 milers. You're going to nail three of them. One of them, you're going to implode. I sign on the dotted line immediately. Give me that implosion for those three nails. Heck, I probably do it for two, maybe even one, depending on how fast that one was like. To be fair, I ate shit. And so I went through the same calculus. And for the commentators out there, especially the ones that are like the shitty people on the internet, like they don't know and they don't know anything, right? Like, I'm a world class coach too. I did the same thing. It's like that was a data point to learn from. When I learned some training lessons about things I had maybe changed, especially the heat suit stuff I definitely overdid. And I think that does not work in the context of my life. And you learn stuff like that in training. That's the fun part. Like it wouldn't be an experiment if you knew how it was going to end. And I'd do lots of experiments, even now that I've done this. And I rolled back some of them after that. But the main thing is just look, the hard part now about racing at the top level is for an athlete like me, that is not one of the gifted like immediate superstars, right? I'm gifted, but I'm not one of those people that can have the me of 2016 that was really good. Would never be able to finish under Mauer. So as soon as you took away the ability to get in as many gels, like I had to go down, I think to 75g or so an hour, I didn't have to, but I did try to troubleshoot like I felt all the things I used to feel. And if I get another shot at this. Leadville was not the plan initially, but it was like, if I get another shot at this, the only rule I'm going to have is that no matter what happens, no matter what you think about your GI system, you are going to take in a gel every 20 minutes for ten hours. And that's what Leadville was an experiment in. And I'll let other people talk about the historical context of this year's Leadville. It obviously hasn't resonated as much on an international news level because of last year. It already happened. Who cares about the second time? It's 14 minutes faster than that and with probably worse fitness. So I think it's just interesting being an athlete. It's an interesting story because you never really know what causes what. You're always just grasping at straws. Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts with the $100, that's for sure. And it is easy to grasp the one thing a person is maybe a little more known for. And look at that and like, just nitpick that specific thing. And when in reality it's like, yeah, there's 100 other things that could derail a race outside of just your nutrition intake. So it's good to hear the whole story and things like that with most of it. Yeah. So one thing I wanted to ask too is like when you do, you have just based on the people you've worked with and you're just everyone you've talked to around this. Is there like a number of carbo grams for carbohydrate per hour? You're like, that's a pretty safe bet for that person to be able to do, even if they don't do gut training. And then beyond that, we need to start implementing some of these training protocols. So for everybody, I think anyone listening can probably get in 75g an hour, unless I think one exception actually is if people have disordered eating histories. Sometimes they are psychological, like the nervous system. I don't say psychological like a brain, but like some sort of mouth gut connection or mouth brain connection knows exactly that there can be issues. And a lot of athletes use dietary restriction, including low carb, as a way to have disordered eating without having it based on certain things. One thing I always ask athletes is if you have any dietary restriction which is totally supported, no matter what they are, but always trace it back to when it began. And really, honestly ask yourself, was I in a disordered place at that stage? And if so, that doesn't mean you can get rid of it. It just means, you know, you need to think about it, work with a specialist, that sort of thing. So that's one exception. But short of that, almost everybody can do 75g an hour with minimal training. The thing is, you just need good products. That's where we have an advantage that previous generations didn't. If you're trying to take in not to disparage them, but I'm not going to say any gel companies, but an older gel style 20g or 25g and viscous, that's hard. But nowadays you have something like a science and sport beta fuel gel, where you can just down the whole thing and it's 40g. It's so easy. What is that? You could take one 40 gram gel every 40 minutes with 16oz of sports drink, and that gets you to 75g an hour, basically something like that. So beyond that, most male athletes or most larger female athletes and larger bodies can do 90g because body size does matter a little bit, not a huge amount because most of our GI systems are basically the same. But it matters a little bit. And once you start going over 75g for a very small bodied person, or over 90g for just about everybody, GI training should probably be a part of it, because at that point the actual load becomes high, like the amount that you're putting into your stomach becomes high, and there are some people that don't need to do any of it. But above 90, I think it's basically universal that you need to practice, not just your fueling strategy. That's not GI training. I think GI training needs to be your fueling strategy and then some. Yeah. Yeah that makes sense I think. Yeah. That is a really interesting point with the product availability now because that was one of the things I was the most interested in because when I did low carb the first time, it was 14 years ago. So I was like, none of this stuff was in the market when I initially was like, you know what, I need to find a different path forward here. And yeah, I wonder if I would have had a different experience had I been using something like science and sport or precision stuff back then in terms of feeling. Oh, 80g doesn't feel too bad. I think I can maintain that. So that has been interesting. Now too, it is like playing around with some of that stuff and kind of how smooth it can go down, go down on your. It's just wild. That's our big advantage. I wish I could go back in time and tell Matt Carpenter, who had the Leadville record and has the highest VO2 max ever recorded by a runner. Yeah, I could give him some of these products. That's it. That one thing. It's why we partner with the feed, give them a plug that they didn't ask for. But if we could give him these products that we have, just with that, I think he would break 15 hours at Leadville if he was focused on it like he was when he did it, just because, like he was grinding up power bars and putting him in a thing of water. It's just so easy now. And I think a lot of people just had initial experiences with. The older products and now it's this shit is so you take it and you're like, okay, this is like consuming space age technology. It's made you literally feel better in your 30s. Yeah, yeah, I remember I think it was 2014 maybe or maybe was even earlier than that. It was. I was out at Western States and Nick Clark was just a few years old where he was around third or fourth place. So he's just going for it this year. And he had this idea of just taking in, I think he was gonna try to take in 60 gels or something like that, amongst other things. And he's like, I'm going to take the gels, I'm gonna put it in my bottles. And he just his gut blew up. And I remember that was just him back then. It was all word of mouth for the most part. And it's just you see that and you're like, oh, okay, don't do that. But nowadays the products you have, it's that pretty much the path forward is to get the right types of products lined up and hit the totals you're looking for. Yeah, yeah. And the people that really came along and reshaped it, it's like Jim Walmsley was high carb before anybody talked about high carb. I remember writing an article that he was, I think, doing 450 calories per hour. We talked about calories per hour back then, not grams of carbs. But he's better than anybody that's ever lived. He's just next level. But one of the first things he discovered is that, and that's probably because he was also talking to cyclists. Yeah, you talked to cyclists. And that's why it's where the conversations are. Most interesting is what happens when dozens of people, like dozens of scientists, are putting food on the table with athlete performance. It's kind of like that's why the interesting discussions online sometimes are so interesting because I am just curious. I'm like, where is your example? Like where is your success story? And there's even some prominent triathlon coaches that are still hanging on to you, like dinosaurs hanging on to whatever just just antiquated approaches. And I'm like, look, dinosaurs, the asteroid has already hit. And that doesn't mean athletes can't have success. Like, you can have some success because there are freaks out there, but it's just not the path. And that doesn't mean like fast and running doesn't have a place, particularly for some male athletes and stuff like that. There are nuances, but you put everybody on a start line and say, your life depends on it. I think even those low carb researchers would probably be stealing some science and sport data fuel gels, at least ten grams of it, right? Yeah, yeah. No, my thing is, if it actually did, if they actually had to put food on the table with athletic performance, they'd be doing high carb almost immediately. And that's the part that I'm always most intrigued by is everyone that truly, like, has no backup plan, like in any sport. And it's just like nowadays it's just they're all in on it as soon as they can because they see what happens really quickly. Yeah. So when you start getting up above 75 to 90g, how much are you? How much are you paying attention to? Like what the product is at that point? Are you looking for a certain ratio in terms of the different types of carbohydrate sources you can get? Yeah. So for you know, I'm sure all the listeners know, but the gut has transporters of different types of carbs. So you're looking at glucose fructose ratios and the exact ratios. They probably matter a good bit. But for me science and sport data fuel has been the go to which is one to point eight ratio glucose and fructose. The 2 to 1 is like aerobic style gels. And I know cyclists have had success with that. I have had a little less success. So I'm more of like the one to point ratio with that. In reality, all I really found is like I need to have practice with a specific gel and also with the sports drink. So I'll do whatever's on course for the sports drink at any race I do. And then because it's basically all similar, similar enough, but with the gel itself, so much of it comes down to the consistency, viscosity and your body's ability to take it in without rejection. That I think it does matter. And so I always urge athletes that if you're going very high, 2 to 1 ratios might still overwhelm gut transporters, especially if you're going like one 4150 and beyond the crazy stuff, which probably no one listening to this should do. Like literally like you would be like, unless you're a professional athlete, don't even mess with that, because that could have risks like that actually could have health risks that we don't know about. Like I'm always cautious because we don't know yet, but I think 2 to 1 might be a little bit more risky at the very high levels. But at 120 and below, it's probably either of those ratios is good. Okay. Interesting. Did I want to just dive a little bit into just how you're practicing with this too? Like from a frequency standpoint, because you mentioned to you that I found interesting. Since you've done this now a while, you feel like you can maybe get away with a little less of it because your body has more or less determined, hey, I can tolerate these high amounts. I don't need to be hitting them. Or maybe let me just back up and say this in a way that makes sense to me. Who hasn't been doing this versus you? Who has? Is there something where I should be thinking about, like from a frequency per week to catch up to where I'll be able to get to my maximum intake at? Should I be doing gut training during interval sessions during long runs? Is there like a certain number of days per week you like to see, or is there anything specific there for someone like you? So the way I would approach it is you're the perfect case study because in the long run, I would do the top end of your reasonable fueling range, which you said was 100g earlier. So I would do and just stick there. But that to me is not GI training. That's more like getting the adaptation benefits from it. And then on your other quality sessions, I would also try to be within your high carb range. So for you 80 let's say so like on your workouts, on your easy runs. Don't need to think about it particularly. You might take in ten, 20, 30g, or something like that, for the same reasons that the study said. But you don't need to worry about it. The places where real specific gut training would be relevant for you is this your cycling or things like that? So what I found with athletes is that the best place to do what I call gut training requires athletes going beyond what their top end range usually would be. So for you going to 120, let's say a little more would be on the bike where you can do it in a setting without the pounding. So you can really work the gut in a specific sense. And this actually comes from an observation I had very early on in coaching back when athletes weren't feeling crazy. But that's Nordic skiers in particular, and cyclists when they come over to running. Very rarely had GI issues. And I think the reason is because in those sports, they'll often have massive quantities of food all at once, like a cyclist that does a coffee shop ride will have a big meal or whatever. They just don't think about it. So they're training their guts in that way. So for us, it's an opportunity. If an athlete doesn't have cycling, aiming to do some session like a quality long run above or a quality like effort above what you're going to do once every week or two weeks, maybe, rather than doing it all the time and the gut turns over fast, responds fast. You don't need to do it too much. But yeah, like that. So going a little bit beyond, plus using fluid to train gut tolerance of volume. So the way I like to frame it is taking in all of your fluid needs. Your hourly fluid needs at once. So let's say you're taking in 24oz of fluid at one hour of your run or 45 minutes of your run, take in 24oz of your electrolyte drink because you need to have balance. Electrolytes. I don't want to do this with plain water. Could be rough, but if you do it all at once and then continue running, you'll actually train your gut to deal with that bloated, quote unquote bloated feeling. and some great studies on this that show rapid changes in how athletes process it, and that those two interventions, especially the fluid one, is the big one. And the fluid one, interestingly, comes from the world of competitive eating, whereas in 2023 I need to solve this problem. This has not been solved in ultrarunning yet, as far as I'm aware. How do we solve it? Competitive eaters. They can't just eat hot dogs in the same way. We don't want to eat tons of gels all the time. They use fluids in a large sense to train their stomach to handle increased volume. And so it stands to reason that we can probably do the same. And some studies back that up. Yeah, that's that was one of the kind of anecdotes that I remember floating around in the early days when I first got it, not that I was there at the early days of ultrarunning, but my early days of ultrarunning, where people would say, yeah, when you get closer to the race, maybe eat a meal before one of your long runs, or just train your body to be. I think that the reasoning back then was just like trying to normalize the discomfort so that it didn't feel like as shocking on event day, but it seems like you're saying like to to a degree, it's just going to make it feel normal to have your normal feeling strategy in place versus it being like something where you have to just learn to tolerate on comfort. Getting the gut and the gut brain connection are both trainable in extreme ways. The gut lining in the cells and the gut turnover so fast. And there's epigenetic history within those cell lines. That's why an athlete like me probably doesn't need to do it that much. Is that epigenetic change, like the environmental switches being turned on from this in a place where you probably have a little catching up to do, and but once that happens, it's fantastic. And same goes with gut brain connection, which is extremely powerful and one that maybe some of our friends with eating disorder histories struggle with a little bit more than others. So yeah, it's such a little understood place like scientific literature, though there are some good studies. Thus it really becomes about what athletes are doing in the field. And that's where coaching gave me this immense advantage, because I get these data points from world class athletes and then see how it works, and then can use myself as a guinea pig to just practice at the edges and the margins and go on to the next step. And before Western states, I tried to go the next step and I realized, oh shit, I actually stepped over the edge. That was not too far. Yeah, yeah. Like you know where the edge is. Yeah. I feel like if anything, that should be for people that are being critical. It's not just an affirmation of the scientific process, especially that I went back to Leadville after. Because there are when you experiment like that, like especially with this type of question, there's just so many moving parts and inputs. We don't know what's what. Yeah. So Javelina, that's coming up pretty quick here. Yeah. Excited I'm guessing. I'm very excited. Laying low, laying low. I'm just telling you, I mentioned in passing, but not doing a YouTube series this time. No YouTube series. And talking about Mudville. No one knew about Leadville other than Megan. Yeah, you snuck in that one. That was definitely a little quieter. As someone who's following your journey throughout. So I was, are you? Maybe you haven't decided yet, but is javelina a path to Western States for you to go back to? I'm sure to be 100% honest. Probably not. Okay. This is a place where the coaching end of it starts to play a role like the old rationale. I actually like this as it is the biggest event of the year for athletes. I want to be on that line as a coach. And it was really weird this year. Like when it matters, right? Like a race, like Javelina, I can go race my athletes and then just turn down a golden ticket, which is my current plan. Unless somebody that's been mean to me is in third place, in which case I'll take it. Yeah. Don't tell anybody who said that. Don't tell anybody who said that, Zach. That's just for you. That's just for you. Don't tell anybody. That was. That's the wrong energy. The one thing I learned after Western states are out. Now, you can keep it in. You can keep it. But I learned after Western states that my I think because it was public because anyone who's been public, including Zach, you get a ton of this. I'm sure I haven't seen it, but everybody does. You get like, a lot of noise. A lot of it is mean, and the tendency is to like, push back and not push back. Like online. But to be like, this is fuel. I'm going to use this for energy and that shit does not work for me. I am not competitive enough. I am not fiery enough. I need to be all love all the time. That's interesting, I was joking, I always say I don't have any evidence for this, but I think like it's that's a lever you can pull. But if you find yourself pulling that lever for a lot of your motivation, it's going to end badly for you eventually. So sometimes I think like maybe 5 to 10% hate in there, maybe could help you get to the finish line a little quicker. Things for me it does. That sort of thing helps you get out the door especially like training is hard and David I love David Goggins and like what he says a lot like a lot of the time. And that type of mindset for me really does help training sometimes. Like it's hard, right? Like but it does not help performance. I'm not competitive enough because the thing is, when I'm actually out there, I'm like, we're all in this together. Yeah, it's just bad for me. So yeah, it's bad for me. Also, I think it's bad for the sport. So my goal is to be all love all the time, forever. Unless I make a really, like, mediocre joke on a podcast, perhaps? No. I think you're doing a good job of living that ethos. Yeah, unless there's a low carb study I need to debunk. Then the angry David comes out. Yeah. Not angry. Not angry. Just disappointed. Harsh, David. Disappointed. I like and in conclusion, like, especially if there are low carb proponents listening to this, I actually love what you're doing and I think it's incredibly important. I think all of these studies have shown really interesting things that have changed the way I think about it and the way I trained slightly. I think when it comes to performance and adaptation, perhaps, but that is the place where I just want to push this message out. And the reason I immediately jumped at the chance to do this podcast, aside from loving Zach like I haven't done podcast recently, is because if ten people listening to this are willing to give this a try, like at low levels, if they haven't done before and they just feel better than they ever have before, it's that's a cool role to have in the sport, is just helping somebody feel like enjoy it a little bit more, where running doesn't feel like this foreign thing as much anymore. Yeah, I personally, I just don't like the idea that someone would get themselves painted into a corner and feel like they can't be curious because they had committed to something. That's at the end of the day, not something you need to commit to. It's like you can try. Like when I first did low carb, my thought was, well, I can try this and if it doesn't work, I can just go back to high carb. And I ended up doing it for 14 years, but now I'm in that exact same spot where I'm like, I can try this and I can always go back. It's not like it's not once I leave, I can't come back in. I hate that sort of mindset. I think the idea of looking at these things is all like tools to be able to play around with if you want to, but yeah, you should be reasonable about it as well. Yeah, like mindedness said, how many times do you change your mind is always a great question to understand. Like any thinker in any space, if you're not seeing them change their mind and get the pushback as a result, that's a problem, right? And then the reality is that a lot of people in the fitness influencer coach space, they rarely change their mind publicly, which is not good. That goes with political thinkers or anything. Basically anybody like you does not like wholesale, but some like for me, the big one that just happened was pizza. Like. Clearly the studies are pointing to a future with each suit. And I was like, all right, what if this is like high carb and the studies are pointing to it, but it just hasn't been fully explored. And I went off and got fucked. And I'm open about that now, like, I'm not. I'm still right. It's not. I was probably wrong about that one. And maybe it would have worked for others, or maybe it would have worked in other contexts. But yeah, Kilian tried the same experiment and seemed to work out for him. I just wish I was Kilian, apparently. Don't we all? Don't we all chugging olive oil to get through podcasts? Yeah. Awesome. David, I'm excited to see what you do at Javelina. Do you think you'll do Leadville again? Are you going to go for a sub 15 or something like that? That's getting close. You're getting really loaded into it. Yeah. I mean, I think it depends if Megan does it. If Megan does it, I'll support her. If not, maybe that maybe I would love to go back to Leadville every year. But I also just kind of want to go to other hundreds with course records and just take shots at them. I love taking a big shot at those types of things. And sometimes the shots don't go in. And maybe my goal for next year is to fail a little bit bigger, which would be pretty big, so we'll see what that entails. I'm excited to follow along. I'm sure you'll have great races mixed in with any failures that tend to pop up, but I really appreciate your time and sharing your insight. Let's hope Pavlina isn't 100 degrees again, because that course record, now that course record is going to get smashed. Well, not by me necessarily by somebody like the sport did an 80 degree day, like a low 80 degree day with a cloud that comes over because sometimes some years that will happen, like a cloud will drift over, like on those middle laps, and you'll just be like, have this little bit of relief that's normally not there. And yeah, you'll be ripping at that point. Yeah. Whether it's me or somebody else, like I was always saying, I'm gonna I'm gonna sign up for Javelina every year that I have left in my, like, peak performance group that day one, because it's the most fun race ever. It's like a party, but two because it's so much fun. The week before last year it was 72 or something. It's like you get that day on that course and it would be such an interesting physiological experiment. Talk about a science experiment. And everybody do your, I don't know, cool weather dance for whatever date Halloween is because I think whether it's me or somebody else, like I think if I was in the field, it would just it'll pull the field a little because you can't you don't won't have an option to go out slow. But if I blow up like Western states like I, I hope that, you know, the weather or somebody else. Like, I just want to see what humans are capable of. That's my new goal, whether it's through coaching or pulling a field forward. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm excited because I love javelin. I'd love to see how that event has grown over the years and how competitive it's gotten. And yeah, pushing that time down as far as we can get it would be exciting. So be cheering for you in October. Hell yeah. You're the best, Zach. Just love what you're doing. It's the coolest thing for the sport and I love what you're doing with high carbs here, too. And balancing and the nuanced understanding of how all this can work together. So thanks for everything. Perfect. Before I let you go, you want to share where people can find you? Oh, everywhere. No summer call play podcast. Yeah. Go to the Somewhere Call Play podcast. Check out the podcast. Yeah. And if you do that, you'll know in five minutes whether it's for you, you know, you'll know if you need to put it on 2 or 3.5 x or if it's for you. Yeah. No. Yeah, yeah. I would say to some people it's acquired taste the number of times we get emails like I listened for two minutes and I was like, it's not for me. And now it's all I listen to. And I'm like, okay, interesting. I didn't need the insult to start, but I will take it. It works. It stands out. That's what you gotta get nowadays to stand out. Exactly. Hey, AI AI isn't coming for us, at least within the next six months. Because it's a little too weird. So, yeah, maybe it's the final message. Hey, be weird, because otherwise AI will come and do whatever you're doing. There you go. Yeah. Awesome. David, have a great rest of the evening. You're the best. Bye, guys.