View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Dr. Nicolas Berger is a Senior Lecturer in Sport & Exercise at Teeside University’s Centre for Rehabilitation. In this episode we discuss Nic’s new study on the limits of ultramarathon performance, which brings together a who’s-who of researchers in the ultramarathon space to create a framework of performance that will be foundational for years to come. We focus on the myriad of factors that influence performance outside of pure fitness including GI distress, psychology, durability, and the integrative way in which these factors combine to affect performance.
Episode highlights:
(28:26) Stephen Seiler’s chart: physiological improvement plateaus with time in trained athletes but performance does not, performance is multifactorial, during longer duration events multifactorial factors matter more, examples, small changes with big impacts
(43:40) Malleable strategies: recognizing that strategies must change based on environmental factors, example, gastric emptying, cycling example, taking advantage of features of the race
(46:54) Durability: Andy Jones and physiological resilience, how we perceive fatigue matters more than the physiology itself, nerve blocking example
Additional resources:
TU Research Profile
Google Scholar Profile
ResearchGate
Twitter
Limits of Ultra: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Ultra-Endurance Running Performance
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Dr. Nicolas Berger is a Senior Lecturer in Sport & Exercise at Teeside University’s Centre for Rehabilitation. In this episode we discuss Nic’s new study on the limits of ultramarathon performance, which brings together a who’s-who of researchers in the ultramarathon space to create a framework of performance that will be foundational for years to come. We focus on the myriad of factors that influence performance outside of pure fitness including GI distress, psychology, durability, and the integrative way in which these factors combine to affect performance.
Episode highlights:
(28:26) Stephen Seiler’s chart: physiological improvement plateaus with time in trained athletes but performance does not, performance is multifactorial, during longer duration events multifactorial factors matter more, examples, small changes with big impacts
(43:40) Malleable strategies: recognizing that strategies must change based on environmental factors, example, gastric emptying, cycling example, taking advantage of features of the race
(46:54) Durability: Andy Jones and physiological resilience, how we perceive fatigue matters more than the physiology itself, nerve blocking example
Additional resources:
TU Research Profile
Google Scholar Profile
ResearchGate
Twitter
Limits of Ultra: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Ultra-Endurance Running Performance
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and this episode of the podcast is about a paper that I think we will continue to reference and is going to have influence in the ultramarathon space years and maybe even decades from now. We're going to look back at this and continue to draw inspiration from and I just happened to have the lead author of this paper on the podcast today. So welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Dr Nick Berger, who is a senior lecturer in exercise physiology at T side university, where he works with endurance athletes and research, is a really broad range of exercise related topics. The paper in question the title is limits of ultra towards an interdisciplinary understanding of ultra endurance running performance, and that title actually says it all. They're going to try to capture a lot of different facets of ultra performance and review them. This paper has an absolutely killer list of authors people who are some of the best in their field, and that shines through in the paper itself. One of the things that I want the audience to take away from this particular podcast is that ultramarathon is an interdisciplinary endeavor that weaves together many facets of performance and ultimately alchemizes them into into performance outcomes. This paper does a great job of encapsulating that. We focus on a few of those aspects in that particular paper, but I encourage the audience out there to go and give this one a read, because you will certainly improve your understanding of what actually constitutes and what actually comprises ultramarathon performance by reading this paper a few times.
Speaker 1:It took me three or four times to actually get a grasp of this paper. I had to go through it. I had to go through it several times to actually completely understand what was going on and prepare for this interview, and I am certainly a better coach for it. So, nick, thank you for your work in this particular area. Okay, with that as a backdrop, I am getting right out of the way. Here is my conversation with Nick Berger. All about what limits ultramarathon performance. Let's get into it. You good, good, very appropriate Rafa shirt. I love it.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, first love is cycling, although I love an endurance sports. But it is, you know, and actually interestingly in, it's a bit divisive in Britain. It doesn't have the best reputation in some circles, but I really like the gear.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the UK's NGP system is a talk for another day with another professional, but needless to say, there's been a lot of people that have been not very enamored let's just put it that way with this system there. But that's neither here nor there. That's another rabbit hole. But I do want it. Since cycling is your first love, I do want to kind of get into your background before we get into the paper itself, because I think that's always interesting for the listeners to hear and I also think it really it dovetails very nicely with all of your co-authors on the paper that you mentioned to, where you all kind of complimented each other, which is something that we can also get into. But first more about you, like who are you, how did you get into this stuff and why are you writing such a ridiculously thorough ultramarathon paper?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll answer the last question last. Just, I mean people, always I've got a bit of a weird accent, so people kind of like you know where is he from and I've had Australia, south Africa, you know. Nobody's ever guessed. I grew up in Germany, so my parents, my dad's German, mom's English, but I actually was born in England. So I went to school in Germany and there's a really good university in Cologne, bortelschule, but I decided to study in England. One of the reasons is much, much quicker. So in England it's three years for a degree, in Germany it's seven, eight years, you know. So when I finished my PhD, my friends were finishing the degrees, yeah, but in Germany I think I like a lot of people on your podcast, they were good athletes, you know, and then they kind of transitioned in.
Speaker 2:I was a trying to be an athlete and I quickly realized I wasn't very good. But I decided to try and be good on the theoretical side, so try and be able to like help people get better. So started to study sports science and then when I was doing that, you know, just being in the lab doing the applied work, that's what really interested me. Obviously, you know I like the psychology and the biomechanics, but the physiology was really kind of an. Interestingly, my undergrad dissertation was on the effects of caffeine in the cold, so I was already kind of doing a bit of environmental stuff. It improved performance, by the way.
Speaker 2:And then I moved to Manchester and did a did a master's in exercise physiology and I was lucky because Professor Andy Jones was at Manchester Metropolitan and, for those who don't know, he's the guy that worked with Paul Arach lift set a world record, and he was working with Edward Cipciogi on the initial breaking two, where he just missed it.
Speaker 2:So I went to see him really early on and he actually had a project that a previous PhD student couldn't do, which I did for my master's, and I must have done a decent job Because on the back of that he said, oh, we've got a scholarship for a PhD, would you like to apply? And I was like, yeah, you know, instead of going to work, let's, let's just stay at university for a bit longer. But you know, kind of that environment was great because he was working with UK athletics and he was getting in, you know, loads of world class athletes to work with and I assisted him, you know. So that was like a really cool thing and you know, like working with Paula Radcliffe. I think it was like six weeks before she set the world record you know that was a pretty cool thing to do, you know, so kind of doing that.
Speaker 2:And yeah, and while I was doing that, I was doing running and cycling myself, but not particularly. You know, I wasn't I run a marathon when I was 18, I started running when I was 16. So you know, it wasn't a crazy. You know time, but I finished it. But cycling was like the one that I was kind of more into. Yeah, and since then I moved to T side and people don't know where that is. So when I applied I didn't know. It's like a region in England, it's in the north, in Yorkshire, and I've been here since 2008. And I'm really lucky because there's a lot of very good athletes here to work with.
Speaker 1:It's amazing how, like the, how much the pedigree and mentorship actually starts to matter when you see this stuff. I mean, I've always I had a very similar story to you from a coaching perspective where I can't take a lot of credit for the environment that I was in. I just happened to land in an environment with a lot of high performance coaches that were very demanding and extremely good at what they did and I soaked it all up as a sponge, and that wasn't any. The soaking it all up like a sponge I can take a little bit of credit for, but landing in the environment is just.
Speaker 1:you know, you might as well have you know, flipped a coin or drew straws or kind of kind of whatever. And it's the same thing with you, with Andy, and I'm always very, I've always been very, very grateful for that, as it seems like you have been as well just for that upbringing, because there's no replacement for that being underneath the umbrella or their mentorship, or somebody who has 25 years of experience with high level sport in all different kinds of situations, and you know, the kind of stuff doesn't come out in a textbook or even in a class.
Speaker 2:No, no, and it's, I think. I mean it's something that I try and do with my students, but it's just the getting thrown in with, like a proper world class athlete. You basically are forced to be professional and do things properly because you don't want to look stupid, you know. So it forces you to do that. And alongside that I was also really lucky because in my PhD so I did the effects of training on VO2 kinetics.
Speaker 2:Vo2 kinetics is about how the muscle uses oxygen at the start of exercise. But so in these I did like five studies where I looked at different types of training and that again, that was fascinating, you know, because we basically looked at the mechanistic basis, you know longitudinal and cross-sectional, so kind of all the ones. So my you know, bread and butter PhD was really kind of digging down into what exactly happens in the body when it trains, which is actually something that really really helps later on when you're working with people, because you have a much better understanding of you know if they do something differently, you know what effect can that have.
Speaker 1:No, I completely agree with that, having a little bit of that experience as well. Okay, so we're gonna jump forward and talk about this paper. You and I were talking offline, but I think this story is important for the listeners, so I was. The origin of how I became familiar with this paper is actually kind of interesting. I was preparing for Ultramarathon coaching conference here in Colorado Springs, colorado, to which I don't. I think it was the first of its kind ever I don't know if there's ever been an Ultramarathon coaching conference and one of the one of the presentations that I was responsible for the title of it at the time was the Physiological Determinants of Ultramarathon.
Speaker 1:And so I'm in the middle of this presentation, kind of trying to alchemize and congeal all of what we know about the sport into, you know, a 40 or 50 minute presentation, and literally while I'm in the middle of it, your paper comes across the wire, to which I was like oh shit, I'd like I can't not. And I was already way behind. Your paper came out on September 5th. We just had this conference a week ago, at the end of September 1st, couple days of October, so you can kind of imagine the timeline I was already. I was already well behind my deadlines, as I kind of always am, and it was one of the. It was very serendipitous because I couldn't not bring pieces of the paper into this, into this presentation that I was doing, but at the same time I kind of didn't have the time to like completely reorient things, so I brought it in and kind of like a halfway type of fashion.
Speaker 1:But a couple of things really struck me. First off, it was completely relevant to what I was talking about and trying to figure out and, admittedly, stumbling through figuring it out, because all the information on this is in various compartmentalized pieces. Now there hasn't been a lot of literature and a lot of work that tries to bring them all together. And the second thing is just your list of co-authors, which I thought was really interesting. A lot of the, a lot of my listeners will be familiar with them. We've got Andrew Beston, who I had him and Herman Ponziade to talk about some of the energetic limits of Ultramarathon performance. Guimie, who I've had on the podcast a couple of times, who was really influential in my early thinking on this. Sam Morkura, who I haven't had on the podcast and I keep badgering to bring on the podcast.
Speaker 1:And I can't get him. I don't have, I don't have enough attention command for him. I guess quite yet.
Speaker 2:I've seen him at a conference. He gives a good talk.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I mean, if you can put a good word in for me, I'd appreciate it. I've been badgering him for a while. Pat Wilson, who I brought him on the podcast when he first came out with his book we had actually flew out to where he, where he lived, to do that. And then Sean Bearden, who was the famous host of Science of Ultra, so it was. It was a little bit of a who's who right Of people in the space who kind of like know what they're talking about. Do you have an interesting story with the paper just being the lead author itself, which I think is actually kind of interesting. So, before we actually talk about it, the title of it and I'm going to leave a link in the show notes is limits of ultra. Getting right to the point one of the limits towards an interdisciplinary understanding of ultra endurance, running performance. But I want you to kind of go over like what the genesis of it was and what the iterations of it were, because I think that's an interesting point for the audience to hear as well.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, obviously we joke about it, but it was an ultra endurance undertaking because it was basically three years in the making, which you know even for like a scientific paper that doesn't actually have any data collection, that is a very long time. My friend, an ex PhD student, dr Rosbeth, who works in New Zealand, mean him, I've done some work on ultra with Sharon Gator, who set the treadmill world records, and he contacted me and said like I've got a really good idea to try and, and you know, do a paper on the limits of ultra. Why don't we get all the experts in the field and ask them to write about their expertise, to kind of try and give a really nice overview to help athletes and practitioners? And I was like that's a brilliant idea. So together we like formulated the emails and, as you alluded to, you know we call them big hitters. You know these are like the superstars. You know these are people that have written a lot of papers.
Speaker 2:They've done some amazing research. So for them to actually agree to this already, that was, you know, a very good experience. And on the original one we also had Trent Stellingworth and he was supposed to give the practitioners perspective and Sharon Gator as an ultra endurance runner with the athletes perspective. So I think it took about a year and we wrote that, the first version, and sent it off and basically came back with it's good but very big. But you know, we don't think the evolutionary thing should be in there. All the sections don't really tie together and you know we don't really see how the practitioner thing fits in very well in the athlete thing. You know is basically like you could rewrite this but it would take you a long time. So it wasn't. You know that was a bit disappointing.
Speaker 2:And then Russ got quite busy as well and it was kind of just there and I was like Sean actually talked to me.
Speaker 2:I talked to Sean and we were like that's great. I talked to Sean and we were like I don't want to like just leave this, like this is such a good piece of work We've done like the majority of it already, you know. So me and him work together to kind of formulate rights, like how can we make this better? And one of the things was to actually make it into one big document that doesn't sound like different people have written it, but also kind of be more specific on kind of right. You know what's the focus going to be and how can we make it, you know, more user friendly. So we very specifically wrote what we wanted in each section and then, once the people had done that, rewrote it so it kind of flows better. And obviously that doesn't sound like it would take a long time, but it did. And then the review process is also quite long. So ultimately, yeah, that's kind of how it all came about.
Speaker 1:I mean it is cliche to make the analogy that it's an ultra endurance endeavor of itself, but here you're almost working on an Olympic cycle. I'll use a different sports analogy. Right, if it's going to take you three years, I mean you're going on four year Olympic cycle at that point, because now you have all of the explaining to do after it's actually published, coming on podcasts and garnering questions and, you know, doing follow ups and things like that. So it might actually last four years.
Speaker 1:To speak to the breadth of this, and one of the things that kind of attracted me to it, just to kind of get right into it, I went straight to table four, which are, you know, the factors that affect the physiological factors that affect any individual and an ultramarathon event, and it's kind of everything, like everything that you can think of. It's a list of I'm not going to count them all out here, but maybe 20, 25. Different, different things that can be that they can ultimately affect your ultramarathon performance. To start out with, though, if we could whittle those down right and we're going to talk about a few of them throughout the course of this podcast If we could whittle those down and some of the the text selection that you, that you ultimately set it on, is a little bit of a window into this. If you could whittle those down like what are the heavier hitters in that, in that arena, I mean.
Speaker 2:So, first off, we need to say obviously what we, what we did, is to try and give people like an overview of the things that they can address. That might limit them and, like you said, obviously some of them might be heavier hitters or kind of bigger and some might be a little bit smaller, but I mean the thing that obviously is really big. You know fatigue, gi distress, thermal regulation and then when it comes to nutrition and hydration, kind of when, if you get those wrong, you know, down the line you have some very severe effects and these can be psychological as well. So the psychological effects, you know, the decision making ability is right at the bottom. But obviously if you are fatigued and you haven't been eating and drinking properly or there's something that you hadn't planned or in or enough think you would encounter, that's really going to affect you.
Speaker 2:Obviously we can talk about the physiological ones, you know, like the heart rate and the cost of running in the VO2. And all those different things that basically change and how you can try and basically minimize those effects, you know. And like the damage to the muscles, like what can you do? Or you know, is it like do you decide I'm going to allow this damage for like a higher pace and I kind of deal with it or am I going to do something about it? You know I'm not going to do anything about it. The motivation effect kind of the motivation just being aware that things change throughout is obviously really important as well.
Speaker 1:Well, and one of the things that ties all of those together that you kind of almost start the paper out with it's.
Speaker 1:The second section in the paper is how we've evolved as humans, and not a lot of people think of this because a lot of people think, okay, well, we're born, I have a certain genetic makeup that my parents gave me, right, my mother and my father gave me, and I can adapt those natural genetics into some athletic traits right, I can run farther, I can lift more, I can, you know, shoot a basketball free throw or kind of whatever it is.
Speaker 1:But I'm taking the traits that were passed on to me kind of in a short term timeframe for my parents. The reality is is like this has been going on for a long period of time and this selection of different phenotypes that we kind of now know as humans has been going on for very, very long time, much more so than parents passing them down onto their kids. And one of the angles that you take from the paper is how that evolutionary process ultimately results in certain traits that we have as humans that are adaptable in an ultramarathon context. And I kind of want to start out with that, because that's the very beginning of the paper and I think it kind of leads into some of the other aspects that we're talking about. So give the listeners kind of an overview of that particular section of the paper and how it came to light and really what's important from a training and a racing perspective.
Speaker 2:So it was Drew who wrote this and that this is. I think there's not many articles on this and, like I said, when we actually first wrote it we had pushback that they said this wasn't that relevant and we shouldn't include it. And luckily in the second iteration they agreed to have it in because personally I think it's A it's fascinating and B it's really important and we often kind of hear this day, we were born to run, you know, like we just have this innate ability to keep going the whole time. And that's not really true because obviously we've evolved, you know, to walk and run and hunt, but there's, you know, there's limitations to that. So we're very good at thermoregulating compared to other animals, but obviously there's a limit to that because we need to consume fluid and the same with energy. We've got good energy reserves but obviously they're not unlimited.
Speaker 2:So the difference between how we've evolved and ultra endurance running is just the actual duration and the speed. So our ancestors I think when we look at some of the research, the longest they would have gone, you know, maybe on a hunt where basically we believe that they went after animals until they collapsed from exhaustion was around five and a half hours, you know, which obviously is a long time, but compared to an ultramarathon that really isn't very much at all. And you know it's also in the past people wouldn't have chosen to do this voluntarily, it was like a necessity. It wasn't something that they thought like, oh you know, I really fancy running around for five hours in the desert hunting someone. You know it was something that they had to do.
Speaker 2:But we were also designed for many other things, you know, like digging and throwing, you know. So kind of just saying oh, we were born to run is just a bit of a generalization and I quite like when we see we talk about that ultra endurance running is is weird. And actually one of the reviewers comments was could you please explain a bit more what that is? And it just stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich democracy. So basically the people that actually are practicing ultra endurance running funnily are called weird. But that's obviously that the people who are choosing to do it Can you emphasize, but not to interrupt you too much.
Speaker 1:Can you emphasize that acronym again, because I think that's important when we make this transition from OK, our hunter, hunter, gather, ancestors did this, ancestors did this, and we are now doing the same thing or something different like that. I think that that illustrates it quite well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean so that you know, weird is Western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies, so it's not many other populations that actually take part in this. And we have some quite nice stats at the beginning of the article as well, that kind of just show, show the numbers on kind of people doing this. But yeah, so endurance running obviously isn't novel, but ultra endurance running is extremely novel, so it's not really something that we've been doing for very long at all.
Speaker 1:And so what does that mean from a practical perspective? Like you mentioned, we're born to run, but not what like for the athletes and the coaches that are out there like listening, trying to design, like training programs and things like that. What does that actually mean for them? This fact that you know we do have these things that are selected for, but yet this is what we are doing, is actually quite novel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's kind of where these, these limits come in.
Speaker 2:So to understand that although we in theory, you know, are designed to do this, there is many things that are going to limit us to actually be to be able to perform for like a long period of time.
Speaker 2:And what we've tried to do is this to obviously summarize all of these. Unless you've alluded to there is a lot, and I think one of the things we don't talk about a lot is this training itself, because I think that's been covered a lot, but it's it's something I think people concentrate on, but they don't concentrate enough On the other things. So people will be like really meticulous about the training they do, but not necessarily about the nutrition recovery. You know, things like the environment running in the dark, you know like the change in circadian rhythm if you're doing like a long event, all these things I think people often neglect, unfortunately, and what always kind of comes out is that people are like a little bit surprised or they hadn't anticipated something, and then the effects were, you know, quite sometimes catastrophic for them and it led to drop out, or maybe, you know, a very, very slow time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I can say just from a coaching perspective, I've always had this dichotomous relationship with what I would, I would probably say is that it synonymizes fitness and that's might be a little bit of an oversimplification, and that's the fact that it's probably not, probably it doesn't look like it's one of the primary limiting factors in ultramarathon, just your cardiopulmonary fitness.
Speaker 1:However, it makes all of the things that are bigger limiting factors better, gastrointestinal stress kind of like being one of them. So if you're under like less duress at any particular pace or power output, it makes the nutrition whatever you're doing, your nutrition plan that you're trying to deploy that much easier because you have more, more kind of resources. And I've always kind of like once again, it's been like I don't know, it's just, it's always been just interesting for me to like look at it through that lens, knowing that I'm focusing on fitness from a coaching perspective so much and not knowing that the direct translation to that is one of the primary limiting, limiting factors, and I think that's something that everybody needs to take into account is that the duties is otherwise specified Nutrition, psychology, pacing gear, thermoregulatory management, all of those things. They're probably bigger limiting factors in most situations than just the cardiopulmonary output that you have, that you come to the line with.
Speaker 2:I've got a good example. Sharon Gator is an ultra-induence runner from my town, gisborough. She set two world records here at the university. One was running for seven days on a treadmill for 835 kilometres and she broke the men's record. Then a few years later she ran 10 marathons in 10 days.
Speaker 2:What I wrote in the paper was that she had an unremarkable VO2 max, which I think was either 54, 56, or quite a bit, I can't remember. It's not bad, but obviously for an ultra-induence athlete that's setting records. It's quite low. But everything else that she does is so good that the pacing is like she is so prepared, she knows exactly what she's going to do, when she's going to do it and also has contingency plans of when something goes wrong how to deal with it. She was doing it for a while, obviously, so she's experienced.
Speaker 2:But it's a great example of someone where if you just looked at like the numbers and you'd be like, yeah, she'll probably finish, but she might not do that well. But actually she outperforms a lot of people, especially in the really long stuff. For those reasons it's a shame that we couldn't have her perspective in the paper, because she does allude to some of these where she also says she's observed a lot of people that are in theory fitter than her but make some quite substantial mistakes, and I think the ones that come out quite often are pacing. So just not having a pacing strategy and kind of going by feeling being like, oh yeah, I'll just kind of see how it goes, and then most people obviously go a bit too hard, and then obviously you have this long list of things that will go wrong in sequence after you've done that that you can't really come back from.
Speaker 1:I think one of the themes that we're going to start to pull out of this, not to preemptively ruin the rest of the podcast, is the duties is otherwise specified. I'm reminded. So when I go through things like this. I'm reminded of this like brilliantly simple theoretical chart that Steve Seiler put together maybe 15 years ago now, that I actually repurposed in my book and all it was was improvement on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, with two different lines, two different kind of asymptotic lines as time went along. One of them was physiology, and you can imagine the shape of that line increases, meaning the improvement is quite rapid early on, but then after three or four years that physiology kind of levels off.
Speaker 1:And we see this in practice all the time, especially with elite athletes, where we can bring them into the lab and then the noise is greater than the signal. We can't really tell if they've actually improved or not and usually it's more of an artifact of how hard they wanted to go for the day or what they ate for breakfast or even what they ate the previous day and things like that. That was one graph, but the other one was performance, and performance did not have, as they didn't have, the same shape of that as physiology did, meaning it did not necessarily meet a point of diminishing returns or it didn't have that same asymptotic relationship where it kind of leveled off over time. And all that illustrates is performance is multifactorial, especially in an endurance context, and I think as the duration of the event goes on, those multifactorial elements become a bigger part of the pie relative to what we would call the physiology or some people would refer to as the cardiopulmonary output.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, and I think I mean that's what I really enjoy when I work with people is just sitting down and talking to them and kind of finding out what they are doing around the training, in the training and the actual events. And sometimes you're quite surprised at, like, the things that come back with. Someone invested so much time and effort and then the execution on the day. There's like some things that they're just oh yeah, just the day before I bought whatever or like that, and just like you know, like oh, I got a flight out the night before because it was cheaper, you know, but it's like a hot environment or something like that, and you're like you know all these things are going to massively impact your performance, so much more than the training you've done in the last month.
Speaker 2:So, carefully, kind of looking at it and planning ahead, because the thing is, this is important to people, you know, like these, like if you train for ultra endurance running, this is obviously important to you and you want to do well. So I think just having the knowledge that changing maybe something small or kind of having a list of like right, actually have I looked at this before? If not, like is, it is easy to change and the answer is probably yes, you know, kind of do that and obviously it takes experience but you have to try things out. But kind of having those you know, just like the knowledge, what could impact you, I think, is really important 100%.
Speaker 1:So we're going to kind of dive next into one of the more common duties as specified that you duties is otherwise specified, as you pointed out in your paper and that's GI distress. It's something that's so incredibly prevalent in ultra and I could give a number of different litmus tests for that. You have some stats in the paper that I'm sure you're prepared to go over. But the single most downloaded podcast that I have is ultra marathon nutrition for training and racing with Nick Taylor, who wrote the ISSN position paper on it, and it's not by a trivial amount, let's just put it that way.
Speaker 1:There's a fairly big gap between that and the other one and it's not it's not certainly my oldest podcast, but it is an older one and continues to receive a lot of attention. I mean, it continues to add downloads to it, and that, combined with the fact that I can go into any number of races and sit at an eight station and watch people coming in and puking and changing their nutrition strategies all at the same time, there's all of these different observations that we have of how important this is. So I want to take the next part of this podcast to kind of pick apart this specifically, why don't you just start by tagging along to that with this prevalence right, which you can take some time in the paper to actually describe? Am I over exaggerating it by saying almost everybody has some sort of GI distress, or what do you have to say to that?
Speaker 2:I wouldn't even say almost.
Speaker 2:I'd say like even you know the, even if you watch normal marathons, a lot of them are puking when they finish. You know so, and the reason I said to you I want to talk about this is because it's tied in with so many of the other factors, because you know the temperature, thermoregulation and hydration. You know, obviously, what you eat before and during is so important. But then you know the factors like nerves, or you know, anticipation, anxiety all these things can cause GI distress and I think the problem nowadays and probably one of the reasons that's such a popular podcast, is so much conflicting information.
Speaker 2:And you know, one of the main things I get asked about like supplements, like you I think, and then kind of like oh, I read, you know, having this and having that, you know, is the best. Is that true? And the answer obviously always is it's like totally individual. You know these are recommendations, but you really have to like work out. You know what works for you, but also what's the intensity that you're going at. You know like, are you competitive or are you kind of wanting to finish and are you trying to maximize performance and maybe risk feeling a little bit nauseous, or how are you going to kind of go? You know, because you see some people, like you were saying, just have no plan and go into aid stations and just consume what's there, which absolutely baffles me if someone's like not tried that before and then they're surprised that they feel ill, you know. But yeah, so that the numbers from Western state obviously are like they're well known, but they're super high.
Speaker 1:And super high. I mean, I'm looking at the stat right now. You might as well, you might as well say exactly how high yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean 96%, 96. That was interesting.
Speaker 1:The other 4% are lying.
Speaker 2:That's yeah, when you were talking to Pat, you're saying, you know, do people actually understand what you're asking? You know, so, yes, so 100%. But then obviously the question is the severity of that. And another, you know significant stat is like sometimes up to half people don't finish, and the majority of those will be related to those kind of issues. So obviously it's a massive thing that people need to take into consideration and what we try and do is kind of give an overview of like right, you know what are the best recommendations that you can try that might help you, but also really bearing in mind what is your level, that you're going to be, you know, doing this at.
Speaker 2:And then some of the work that Ross has done, which is really good, is to do with flavor fatigue and also like trying different things, because flavor fatigue is real, but basically you get sick of a certain. It might be the best food for you, but you can't face it anymore because you've had so much of it and then people want something else. So how do you get around that? And is there a kind of things that you can try that have like different flavors or tastes and obviously you talked about things like ginger, but just kind of having foods where you know you can deal with them and having like a contingency plan of if you are sick of something or you're tired of it, what else could you have that you know you can have, you know, as a backup plan.
Speaker 1:I'm going to read one line in the paper really quickly here that I think speaks to this kind of integrated nature of how GI distress is integrated into the rest of the stressors that are actually going on. And it's I don't know, it's kind of in the middle of that of section six, if you want to follow along, since you've got it up. This is strategies for lessening the risk of nausea during an ultramarathon include heat acclimation, the use of pre exercise and during exercise cooling strategies, avoiding excessive hypohydration and being mindful not to over hydrate, and there's a whole section that kind of follows. But the reason I'm pointing that out is it's not changed what you're eating, it's changed what you're doing and there's a lot of other stuff that is behind that.
Speaker 1:I don't want to take that sentence in isolation. Certainly there is some nutritional components to it as well, but the fact that that paragraph kind of starts out with here's all these other things that you can use to mitigate GI distress, I think is actually very eloquent and very telling also for the audience when they do encounter this during a race. It's not that you can change your food stuff. That's absolutely a part of the strategy. But another part of the strategy is hey, what are all these other things that are going on that you can reduce the stress of in order to get your nutrition program back on track?
Speaker 2:Really. I'm glad you read that out. So heat acclimatization is obviously key in any event where it's going to be warm. So not only does, it is detrimental performance if you don't do it. But I think most people have experienced going somewhere hot and it makes you feel ill because obviously your body can't deal with it. It's trying to thermoregulate but it's not got the capacity to do that. So obviously, doing that before any event, and actually that it's not difficult to do, even if you don't have access to, like a heat chamber, there's ways of kind of going around that.
Speaker 2:Cooling strategies, again quite simple, and actually some of the work that Russ again has done is to do with mental mouth rints, and it's quite interesting because it doesn't actually cool you down. It tricks your brain into thinking that you're cooler, which makes you feel cooler, which can lessen the feelings of nausea. So it's something that's kind of worth maybe trying, similar to kind of the carbohydrate mouth rints that people were using Pre-exercise slushies or during exercise are actually on the skin but also in the stomach. And I mean, who doesn't like slushies? This is something, for example, in cycling, like Team Ineos they are apparently they're known for their slushies, and other teams like try and get the bottles where they make the beta fuel and I think they put like a tiny bit of mitten and then make it into a slushie and everybody seems to absolutely love it, then obviously being dehydrated.
Speaker 2:So you know, because we talk about hydration and the fluid strategy, which is such a complex thing that people often get wrong, and then also the other side, to over hydrate, and it's the symptoms for both are the same. You know you kind of get sick and lightheaded and the danger obviously with hypernatremia is, you know it's quite dangerous but people often think like, oh, I haven't drunk enough. And also this thing where people are just drinking plain water. You know that can be quite a dangerous thing, especially if it's quite a long event and they're not kind of putting back any of the salts and minerals that they're losing. But you know that help you actually retain the water in itself.
Speaker 1:Well, and I keep kind of coming back to this integrated nutrition piece of it because right in the next paragraph I didn't think about this beforehand, but I just noticed you start to talk about some of the psychological pieces of this as well, and I remember Pat going over this.
Speaker 1:When I interviewed him for my podcast about 18 months ago Maybe it was even longer than that he said listen, the number one predictor of if you're going to get GI distress is previous GI distress and there's probably a psychological component to that, meaning there's some amount of anxiety either around the race and or around the fact that you have gotten previous GI distress that predisposes you to GI distress in a future event. And one of the things that you actually mentioned in the paper is a mitigation strategy is to just realize that's going on and change your strategy going into that. So that's a little bit more forgiving, for lack of a better word, and I thought that was a good way to. Not you're recognizing the problem, but you're recognizing the solution to it is to just recognize the problem and change what you're doing right, Not to come up with some sort of psychological intervention. You're coming up with a nutritional intervention to handle this psychological phenomenon almost.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because that doesn't just apply to nausea, it applies to pain and fatigue as well, because we found that most successful ultra-injurance athletes they have knowledge or they can predict okay, this is how much is going to hurt, this is how tired I'm going to be, this is how sick I'm going to feel, and obviously, when it happens, it's not a surprise.
Speaker 2:But obviously the anxiety before I mean nobody likes being sick, right, so nobody likes vomiting Obviously, if this happened before, you're worried that this is going to happen and there is a very strong link, like you said, between anxiety and your stomach. There's a reason when you say like, oh, I can get nerves, I can feel it in my stomach and just having some kind of intervention before, where you're actually trying to be calm and mindful and breathing, and a lot of people don't like this, they're like, oh, I'm an athlete, I don't think this is going to help me. It is actually something that's extremely useful and when you talk to successful athletes, they do this, but they don't call it that. It's like self-talk or whatever, but they actually do this already. They're like aware that this is going to happen and it does kind of decrease the severity of it. It might not stop it completely, but it decreases the severity of it.
Speaker 1:Well, and what I take from both of those, both the kind of this intertwining of the environment and the intensity, as well as some of the pre-racing anxiety, is and I'm coming at this from a coach who is a practitioner's point of view is I make sure that the nutrition strategy that have one of my athletes deployed during the race is malleable to those situations.
Speaker 1:And I just went, actually went through this yesterday where I've got an athlete that's doing a race out in a kind of an island environment and it's going to the race is going to be very hard at the beginning and kind of easier and cooler as well in the middle, is kind of the, the, the, the general point so hotter and harder at the beginning and easier and cooler in the middle, because the race gets technical and so you can't, you can't go as hard right, the intensity is lower and it's going to be at night, and so literally what we're changing is is there's going to be more fueling during the part where it's easier and cooler, and just less fueling, realizing that there's going to go, that there's going to be some sort of deficit in the early part of the race and the math kind of works out at the end, and you know it's.
Speaker 1:I think that coaches and athletes, they can look at their plan like that. We're typically used to like seeing these things in paper. Oh, you need 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, right? So that means 60 every single hour. Well, there's probably some malleability that you need to deploy with that, depending upon the environment, the intensity and all of these other things that are going on.
Speaker 2:I mean, you just need to look at gastric emptying you know, if somebody is going extremely hard, you can pour as much as you want into the stomach. It doesn't mean you're going to absorb it. If anything, probably it'll make you feel worse, you know. So, as you rightly said, yeah, kind of having a bit of a strategy, and I think obviously cycling in general is easier to eat on the bike.
Speaker 2:Obviously, I'm kind of carrying it, but they often kind of have these strategies where they are very keen on having solid fuel in periods where it's flatter or easier, and when it goes up the hill or kind of towards the end, they switch more to like the gels and drinks and stuff like that, because they're kind of aware of this. The nausea isn't not as bad in cycling as it is in running. But you can kind of take some of the things that they've found and kind of apply them to running as well. And generally also, yeah, when it's kind of cooler. You know, people are like, for example, like you're saying, at night time they don't struggle as much to eat as they do when it's hot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's something that I've absolutely changed over the past couple of years is taking advantage of those different features of the race for lack of a better word whether it's hotter, cooler, slower, higher intensity, lower intensity, and kind of molding the nutrition strategy to a certain extent around some of those features just to make it more sustainable. I guess is the theme that we're trying to do.
Speaker 2:That's what you can plan and be realistic about. You know, can you consume this while you're running? You know, if it's like a technical descent, you know there's no good say to someone oh yeah, make sure that you like eat something while you're doing that, because it's obviously it's not going to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm going to make a hard pivot. You get with that, of course, okay, so I'm going to invoke your you know, one of your big influencers, andy Jones. He wrote this really cool paper on the fourth physiological dimension of durability. He used a different term and you can correct that. I'm using a more colloquialized version of it Physiological resilience, I think, is what he actually used, and it's just this concept that our physiology deteriorates over time, and a lot of people think that that's kind of a no shit statement, which it really is, but the practical piece of it is is that typically, when we're measuring one's physiology, we're doing it in an arrested state, but in any endurance event and ultramarathon is just a, you know, just a very hyper example of this that physiology deteriorates over time and you take some. You take some time in the paper to go over how some of those systems might actually deteriorate.
Speaker 1:But there's also a really neat section of the paper I'm referring to section 8.2 that this is probably a lot of Sam's work that that that puts forth this notion that how we perceive how we are actually fatiguing is ultimately what is going to limit our performance, more than the underlying physiology itself, which is a concept that I actually find, you know, quite fascinating, and there's a, there's some by a lot.
Speaker 1:There's a biological basis to this. We know, when we introduce, like, nerve blocks and things like that, people's rating of perceived exertion doesn't go down during a task, which is kind of crazy to think about. Right, you're doing some, you're doing some physical tasks and you're not receiving input from what's going on at the level of the nerve and the level of muscle and you still think you're going as hard Like that's. That's a kind of a remarkable finding from some recent work on another meta analysis that Sam was, sam was involved in. So I was wondering if you could kind of like overview this, this section, and how it's applicable to an ultramarathon performance. We know that the physiology declines, but how we perceive how we're actually doing might actually limit our our kind of like end performance.
Speaker 2:I think we need to maybe explain a little bit kind of what RPE is and things like that.
Speaker 2:Maybe people know.
Speaker 2:But rating of perceived exertion there's different scales but just the general one is either from zero to 10, zero being I'm doing nothing, the 10 is maximal.
Speaker 2:Or, like the original one, six to 20, 20 being maximal, and you just say how you perceive how hard the exercise task is and obviously what you can find is even at the same intensity over time, the speed or the power, whatever it might be, isn't changing, but the perception of the effort goes up. So you're perceiving it as harder, which either means you might slow down or, because it's so hard, eventually maybe you'll stop. But kind of being aware of that obviously is something that's really helpful, because going into it and being like, oh well, in training around for three hours at this pace and it felt fine, but now you're doing it for like eight, nine, 10 hours, the pace hasn't changed, but your body is saying I'm getting more tired. I think just the awareness of that is really important. But obviously there's things you can also do to mitigate those feelings of fatigue if you are aware of it, and obviously we kind of said those are like the physiological ones.
Speaker 1:And my colleague over at the Olympic Training Center, Lindsay Gowlich, who runs their high altitude.
Speaker 1:She runs their environmental chambers, so they've got a chamber in there that can go to any altitude and kind of any heat Sees this quite apparent where she can increase the altitude or increase the heat and keep the pace the same and everything changes.
Speaker 1:The physiology changes, where the athlete actually fatigues changes, their perception of what is going on changes and ultimately she'll take them to kind of failure on the task at a steady state, run or power output or whatever, just based on manipulating the environment and some of the things that the athlete actually senses, whether it's heat, altitude or kind of a combination of those two. And you see that in an ultra, where all of these your body's kind of constantly assaulted with all of these things, whether it's just pain at the level of the foot right, Just skin injuries, blisters and things like that, whether it's the temperature and the environment of that actually affecting, like how you perceive things this whole smorgasbord of insults are kind of constantly. You're constantly exposed to them during an ultra and you're having to process it the whole time. I think that's what makes it a kind of a complicated endeavor, is that psychologically you're trying to process all of these things and what they actually mean for performance.
Speaker 2:But I think it's good if you could experience this, like you said beforehand. So one of the things that I've often done with athletes if they're going to altitude or somewhere hot, you just replicate that and they just run at a given pace and, just so they're aware of their perception, they kind of feel more breathless and obviously the heart rate goes up in the heat, obviously they feel much more tired and they have to run slower.
Speaker 1:Some of that dovetails to. I'll let you collect it a little bit. Some of that dovetails into this concept we use in coaching, called long-term athlete development, and all that describes is how the training and racing process should evolve over long periods of time let's say a decade with one particular athlete and there's a component of that where the athlete is learning to race. That's the kind of the phase of it, if you want to think about it like that, and essentially what that describes is exposing the athlete to a myriad of different race situations, just so that they know what they are, and that's ergogenic in and of itself. There's no physiological transfer from getting exposure from a race in 2013 to a race in 2025. That physiology has largely been washed out at that point.
Speaker 1:But simply having the experience and having that perception is meaningful years down the line because when you do get something similar or tangentially related, you can go into that memory bank, that internal memory bank, and say, okay, you know what I've been here, this is what I did, this is what I feels like.
Speaker 1:It's not novel and I survived the first time. And you do see this with a lot of novice ultra marathon athletes, where they get to the point where they get to the I'm laughing because I'm going to make another point with this that I just thought of they get to the point to where they've exceeded their longest long run and it's kind of a holy shit moment for them because they're literally entering into unknown, into unknown territory and a little bit of afraid of what that, what those perceptions are actually going to be, so much so that it actually influences what they think their longest long run should be going into a race. They want it to be as long as possible to try to cover up this like gap of unknown in the training process, and I think that that's a direct reflection of them internalizing the fact that they know that their internal perception of fatigue is going to be somewhat limited and they're trying to use that as like a stopgap measure.
Speaker 2:Definitely. And I think one of the things obviously there just extending your long run to be as long as there's limitations to that, but obviously there's things. If you don't have the luxury of doing lots of events all the time, you can still look at the demands of the event and try and replicate them. Are you going to run through the night? Obviously that's something you should practice. Are you going to go to altitude? Obviously going to be temperature fluctuations. Are you going to have to change clothing and just kind of maybe then being aware, oh, I'm going to sweat less, I'm going to sweat more. I realized that at two o'clock in the morning what I actually like to eat is different to what I like to eat. It's seven o'clock in the morning. Just kind of doing that and training, then going into the event. I think people can feel a lot more confident that they kind of like right, it might not 100% be correct, but it's something that at least that they have an idea what to expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know there's a lot of coaches and athletes out there that struggle with some of these types of interventions Overnight run, running in the heat and things like that because they look at it as like robbing Peter to pay Paul, right. So there's somehow deteriorating the quality of that single workout or the surrounding workouts. Like in an overnight run, right, I mean, you do an eight hour overnight run and that certainly is of less quality than doing an eight hour run on one day and then having the capacity to do eight hours on something else. It's just more fatiguing because you're staying up and things like that. So they think that it's a robbing Peter to pay Paul because they're deteriorating the quality of that kind of of that training session.
Speaker 1:But what I encourage athletes to think about is what do you have more to gain? Do you have more to gain from the exposure to that or do you have more to gain from the fitness of trying to keep the workouts more pure, so to speak? And that's a coaching debate that we actually have quite a lot, and personally I've tried to become a little bit more nuanced in that area, realizing that, especially with really experienced athletes, the physiology is just so hard to change, if it changes at all, and you're just trying to just keep it the same almost you're trying not to screw it up, and so I think the learning lesson in that is, as we were talking about earlier the duties is otherwise specified probably need to be trained for and put a little bit more attention on the more experience the athlete gets and the more that what we would call fitness kind of reaches this point of diminishing returns.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like obviously we said that at the beginning. People like really concentrate on the training and I mean just from experience of the athletes hate missing sessions. They'd rather do miss whatever it might be, but never a training session, because sometimes obviously it's like right, the other bits that might help you will be more important than the one training session that might be missing or you might have to cut short or something like that. Sometimes they need convincing, but I think people once they've experienced it, they probably buy in a bit more.
Speaker 1:And you would never say that with like a marathon or a 10k athlete. That's what's so cool. Like with a 10k athlete, it's like, okay, we're going to get you as fit as possible. Like there's no, because there's these like other considerations not that they're not there. Like there's still some I've been describing it as his duties is otherwise specified, but they're just not as prevalent nor problematic. So you know, you get on the track and you do your. You're trying to optimize the workout session. Right is the game that everybody's playing in an ultra. One of the cool things is you could, you can, make very compelling arguments to reduce the optimization or effectiveness or whatever of a or what we traditionally think of as effectiveness for a session in terms of its physiological outcomes or cardiopulmonary outcomes for a different type of outcome. That's a very realistic trade off. That we're kind of constantly evaluating it in something of this paper actually really illustrates quite well.
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean, that's obviously what's in in the section on fatigue and performance. Fatigue ability as well is it's not necessarily the underlying physiology that's limiting, it's your perception of fatigue and what you can do, because you can be as fit as possible. But if your perception is that you're absolutely so tired you can't go on anymore, then that will be limited. You might be a little bit less fit, but your perception is right. Actually I can keep going. That's obviously far more important.
Speaker 1:Your perception is your reality right. Exactly that's what psychologists would like to say. Okay, last piece here and we'd be remiss not to mention this because we don't know everything. We probably never will know anything. But ultramarathon in particular. It's a hard sport to study and there are a lot of limitations for, especially when we try to like look at things in the field.
Speaker 1:I brought up this great case study in this coaching conference that I was at that I was alluding to earlier with this athlete that they studied during Trigent, which is 330K race in Italy that I've done personally, and they measured. They were able to use a portable metabolic cart and measure his oxygen uptake during the race. However, once you dig into the paper, they did it for six of the. I think there's like 30 coals or something like that. There's like 30, between 30 and 40 coals.
Speaker 1:My point with that is is a very, very, very small selection of the race, with all due respect to the people who are doing that research, because even that is really difficult to do and I just use that as an example, as just one example of how difficult it is to get. First get people that are willing to do this kind of stuff, and this is a field study. That's probably the most difficult thing to get people to like hook stuff up to them, as they're in the middle of a really arduous race. But to get just get subjects in a normal study is difficult, and to get subjects in an ultramarathon study even whittles it down more, and then to actually figure out what is actually going on just gets really, really, really problematic. So I was wondering, if you could, since you spent some time on the paper touching on that, could you touch on that a little bit further? Like, where are current blind spots in piecing this whole limits of ultra together?
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously we need to maybe first explain why most studies are in a lab. So normally what we do in a lab is so we can control everything. We can control the temperature, we can control the intensity, we can control what they did before and we can measure everything. We can measure oxygen uptake, we can measure blood, can measure whatever we want, and we can obviously manipulate as well. Quite easily you can give them something, take something away, whatever it is, and then we have a really nice set of results. But the problem is it's not necessarily applicable to the real world. So having someone on a treadmill in the lab for whatever a few hours is not the same as running outside, even if it's fairly flat, but obviously ultramarathons typically go up and down. So there's a big lack of research in the field that gives us data which is ecologically valid, which basically means that you can actually apply to the real world. And the problem is that obviously, like you alluded to first of all, these events are extremely long. You need fixed measuring points and obviously a lot of the equipment is quite expensive and also not easy to move. Nowadays you do have portable gas analyzers, but even they weigh a little bit, so getting someone to wear that's obviously quite tricky and then it's just kind of the actual the number and not having people kind of drop out, and then all the environmental factors that change all the time would be so hard to kind of predict.
Speaker 2:And obviously there are some studies in the lab. So, for example, the two that I've done luckily Sharon was really willing to have continuous measurements of VO2 and blood markers and I've measured what she ate and all these kinds of things. But because she was in one spot that was really easy. But for someone that's moving through a mountain or wherever there is, it's almost impossible. So a lot of the studies that we have in the lab. And I mean one of the things that you highlighted in one of your Twitter posts was related to running economy. Running economy in the lab on a treadmill has like zero bearing well, not zero, very little bearing on running ultramarathon on rocky terrain. Those two things can't be compared and it's almost impossible to actually replicate the course of an ultramarathon indoors on a treadmill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so not only like getting the subjects and trying to make the correlations, just finding the people that will actually do it becomes really problematic. Because even if you're doing it on a lab like finding somebody who's willing to run through four hours on a treadmill, like we all think we know those people, but finding them all in the same location first off right that we got to physically like come to the lab and actually doing it is way different than oh yeah, sure, I'll go ahead and sign up for that and that's a big problem. Across, like all sports science literature is just the numbers of people that participate these studies. They tend to be very underpowered as a whole.
Speaker 2:Well, typically, the better they are as well, the less willing they are, because we'll interrupt the training you know, and especially if you're trying to do some kind of intervention. You know, after like ask them to like not do what they'd normally do, which they are not very keen on, like you said. But yeah, kind of recruiting subjects is the number one problem in sports science research.
Speaker 1:Outside of us just lamenting on some of the issues with this. You mentioned running economy and how I'll just use the word locomotion. Economy might be important in an Ultra but it's very hard to study because we can't use. It doesn't correlate very well from the treadmill. Are there any other like areas that we just have a hard time studying? That would be good learning lessons for the people listening to this in terms of trying to figure out actually how they can actually train for them or how they might actually be limiting in performance, like a category of cardiopulmonary physiology or running economy or even strength, right? I mean, ghee's done a lot of fatigue ability studies during Ultras, just pre and post, where they do, you know, maximum voluntary contractions and things like that. Is there any kind of like category? That is just a really big blind spot right now that you feel that we've got to like actively try to try to figure out.
Speaker 2:I think people are trying to kind of pinpoint this, but I think it's just the combination of areas that can cause fatigue on the body that will add towards the energy need, and there's so many, you know. Obviously we talk about using poles versus not using poles to minimize muscle damage, but just the concentration required for running over rocky terrain and carrying equipment, and then the energy needed for digesting certain foods, depending on what you have, then the energy to keep yourself warm or cold, you know, but that obviously changes all the time. So all those things combined are so hard to kind of pinpoint, you know, because they're so varied. And then you have people that have, like, more muscle mass than others, you know. So for them, if they're using poles, the VO2 will go up because they're using muscle mass. Some people that are smaller, that will not have so much of an impact, you know. So there's all these things that complicate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I keep trying to pin you down, but it's a little bit unfair because you're right, it is everything Like as the longer and longer I'm in this sport, and especially exposed to people like yourself and also working on the coaching side of things with athletes I keep coming down to this multifactorial element and trying to recognize and incorporate it more. And I know that's a hard like for people listening. They're like just give me the freaking answer, right.
Speaker 2:And the answer is everything. The answer is like yeah, but, and then 10 minutes and you're like okay, there's no easy answer. Like no, there is no easy answer. Unfortunately, you know there's no. Like nice sound bite.
Speaker 1:That's why we do long form content right, I would love to put out 120. I don't know how many characters I get on X anymore. It seems to change X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it. I lose track of the character limits of those formats and that's why, actually, why I like this format a lot, because we can kind of dive into that stuff and it doesn't have to come down to this is the one applicable thing. If we have a lot of things that we can okay, look, we might need to look at this, we might need to look at that, and the audience can, in aggregate, take from that collectively through not just one podcast, but there's going to be Venn diagram overlaps with probably 20 different podcasts. That I've done, we've kind of done our job there and bringing out some of this, some of this complexity, because it's certainly not just the highest mileage wins or the highest VO, two wins. Although those things are important, right, they're not necessarily. They're not important in isolation. You have to consider it in conjunction with everything else.
Speaker 2:I think it's a nice point to make to try and avoid those people that claim that they have a good answer because, it doesn't exist. It's not that simple and you get people that kind of make those statements or claims about whatever it might be in a nice little format and basically they're selling people short. It's not true, unfortunately. It is multifactorial. It's not a sexy, but down the line it will make you a better athlete.
Speaker 1:That is a brilliant place to leave it, nick. I'm going to leave links in the show notes to the paper itself. Where else can people find you and more about your work and maybe cajole you into getting this paper, because I know the academics hate having to do end arounds with the publishing industry.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't mind. I mean I am on X or Twitter. Mr Stockton Nick Berger, if you type my name in my TZ University research portal thing would come up. If you use Google Scholar, just type my name in, you'll find the articles that I do. But on the actual paper itself, because I'm the corresponding author, if you click on it it'll immediately just show my email. So people can obviously email me and get in touch if they want.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the academics are really brave putting your email addresses out like that. That's the one thing I keep thinking about when I see this. So kudos to you. I, like I said, I find it fascinating. This is a paper. Once again, it was really well done. I'm saying that sincerely. We passed it around our coaching group and we're going to take probably a couple of continuing education sessions to digest it all pun intended a little bit more, and I imagine that years from now we're going to kind of continually be referencing this. It's going to be something that I come back to when I bring new coaches on board, that I need to kind of bring them up to speed on things. So kudos to you for you and the whole team for putting this together.
Speaker 2:I was going to say, I need to thank, obviously, everybody who wasn't just me, everybody else that contributed. You know, it's a it's an effort that everybody did together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Thank you for coming on the podcast today.
Speaker 2:No problem, Enjoyed it All right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Nick for coming on the podcast today and going over just a couple of elements of this paper. This podcast could have easily been four or six hours long and true ultra marathon style, but we decided to focus on just a couple of those critical elements. As I mentioned during the intro, I encourage all of the listeners out there, especially the coaches that are working with athletes, to go and reference this paper. This is going to be something that we actually bring up in our coaching department. I've already distributed it to our entire coaching department and I'm sure we're going to have a lot of conversations around various aspects of this paper itself. So congrats to Nick and his team who worked on this, and thank you for your contribution to the space.
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