KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
The Brain’s Role in Ultrarunning Performance with Scott Frey, PhD (2024) #240
Dr. Scott H. Frey is an internationally renowned neuroscientist and psychologist, accomplished
endurance athlete, author, and teacher. Scott helps individuals and groups identify and realize
their aspirations. He can be reached at: Scott@CerebralPerformance.com
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your host, coach jason coop, and this episode of the podcast is a re-release of one of my all-time favorite conversations. It is about the brain's role in ultra running. Welcome back to the podcast today, dr Scott Fry, who is an internationally renowned neuroscientist. He's a psychologist, accomplished endurance athlete, he's an author and a teacher. He was also literally at the forefront of functional MRI technology and has shaped how we view the brain's role under stress and during performance. Also today you'll hear from CTS coaches Neil Pallas, who's a mental performance coach and licensed therapist, as well as dialogue from coaches Addison Smith and Adam Ferdinandson, who provide their coach input on what's on some of the aspects that Dr Fry and I talk about throughout the course of this podcast. All right, folks, with that as a backdrop, I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here's my conversation with Dr Scott Fry all about the brain's role in ultra running. Well, Scott, thanks for coming back on the podcast. I think we'd be remiss if we didn't initially have some discussion about why you're sitting in front of me today and why people's ear holes are being filled with your voice. It's based on a previous podcast that I did that you just happened to be listening to and, first off, I'm appreciated of really smart people like you that actually listen to the podcast and also listen to the podcast and then give me feedback about it. So why don't you take the listeners through that? First and foremost, what's the origin story of us getting on the horn together today to discuss this topic?
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, jason. So picture this I'm in my car, I've got my skis all waxed, I'm driving over the border from northern Colorado to Wyoming Big training day, upcoming for some cross-country ski races. Headed to my favorite cafe to fuel up before I head up the top of the pass and I'm listening to the new CoopCast and you have Dr Nick Berger on super smart guy and you guys are talking about durability and I'm like this is perfect, because I'm about to go do this like multi-hour high altitude skate skiing workout. I need to hear about durability before I take this beast on, right? So I'm loving the conversation, I'm just learning a ton and really great stuff, but I keep getting this little like nagging thing that something's missing.
Speaker 3:And, of course, for me, right, all the world's a nail when you have a hammer. I'm a brain science guy and so I'm thinking, come on, you've got to say something about the brain, about the central mechanisms, role in fatigue, right? Because fatigue and durability are like two sides of the same coin, I think. And so I get to the cafe, I order my great big bowl of coffee and carbs and I'm sort of sitting down. I'm like I got to write Jason and say, hey, man, I love that conversation, but there was, like this 800 pound gorilla in the room and, to your credit, you did say you know we should probably talk about the psychobiological model a little bit here, but it didn't actually come to pass. So this is the origin of today.
Speaker 1:So, to summarize it, it's you calling me out on a big glaring flaw. That was in the last podcast, which I'm, once again, I'm totally appreciative of, just as you mentioned. You know, when you know you have a particular hammer, everything else is a nail. I think a lot of coaches can actually empathize with this and a lot of people in sports science can actually empathize with this as well. There is a very big biological bias for a lot of what we do from a performance perspective and that history goes back a long time, way before I started coaching and way before I was a very mediocre athlete, and that legacy has persisted because of that initial orientation of as we look at the body primarily as this vehicle that can do work and that work is limited by the physical constraints of the size of our muscles and the size of our heart and how much blood we can pump through it and things like that. And we're beginning to well, before I get into that, a lot of my initial training as a coach absolutely had that biological bias behind it. You know we had access to a lot of the physiologists and coaches at the Olympic Training Center and they would come and influence the next group of coaches and the next group of athletes and so on and so forth. And it's not because they didn't recognize some of these other areas of performance and areas of fatigue and namely the brain, which is what we're going to talk about today, but it's just because of the way that they grew up and their bias and their training and things like that, and we're starting to recognize more and more about the kind of brain's role in this.
Speaker 1:And I think the best way to really illustrate that is is how this working model of fatigue has evolved from purely a biological one or purely a physical one to a central governor model, to use a term that a lot of people will be familiar with. To now, what we're coining is the psycho-biological model of fatigue which you referenced in that podcast, which kind of merges everything together. So we're getting there. We might not get there yet and I could go through another 20 years of my coaching career and I would still probably have that biological bias to it because I kind of started out with it. So kudos to you for rightfully course correcting the ship and we're going to spend some time talking about that. So I think the best way to start out about how fatigue is actually multifactorial, right? We talked in the last podcast about some of the physiological mechanisms that go into fatigue or, more specifically, durability. But why don't you like illuminate for the listeners a little bit about how the psychological, or how the brain, actually impacts some of these fatigue mechanisms as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And one thing I just like to emphasize is that I see the world as all being physiology right. So I'm a neurophysiology guy, so I think about our perceptions, our emotions, all of our thoughts, our plans, all of the things that go into our behavior is being grounded in physiology as well, and I think I see my role is really pulling things that have been sort of viewed as non-physiological and out there maybe in the realm of sports psychology into the realm of biology. So that's, I see that as the common platform for us to really talk about all these issues. So I think that's the common ground and, to be fair, I think sports psychology maybe hasn't done the best job of rounding itself and using the language of biology as a common vernacular, and that may have created some of the gaps with other fields of exercise science, but that's a whole other discussion. So when I talk about fatigue, I always like to go back to the studies that were done in the late 19th century and I'll be very brief about this, but I think they capture the essence of what we're talking about here. So amazing Italian scientist named Angelo Mosso, and the exercise science world, the muscle physiology world in particular will know that name because he had a lot of great discoveries about muscle physiology, in particular fatigue in muscles, and he formulated these laws of exhaustion right Now.
Speaker 3:Lesser known is that Mosso had a real interest in central mechanisms of fatigue as well and he recognized things like motivation is playing a really important role in when we reach a state of exhaustion and don't perform and can't perform further. Okay, so he acknowledged that there were these peripheral mechanisms which you and Nick talked really elegantly and in depth about in the earlier podcast. But Mosso also talked about there being central mechanisms, and by central I mean brain. But he was doing this in the late 1800s and the tools for really looking at that were pretty simplified. Super clever guy. He built this thing called an ergometer where he could have people lift a little weight on their index finger until they couldn't move it anymore and he could trace right on a rolling sheet of smoked paper Brilliant right. He could trace the amplitude of those movements. He could track the force and the speed of those movements. He could track the force and the speed of those movements. So this guy is an incredible genius. One of the coolest things he did, I think, in lesser known than his muscle physiology work is that he looked at how mental fatigue affected the ability to perform work in his ergometer task with the finger. So he got his colleagues who were busy lecturing and teaching students and he would measure them before. They spent like five hours, you know, examining doctoral students' theses or something, and then measure them afterward and what he showed is that their ability to do muscular work went down based on the amount of mental fatigue they had sustained during that day of academic work. And so those are really the seeds, I think, of appreciating that there are both central or brain and peripheral neuromuscular mechanisms of fatigue.
Speaker 3:And now the traditional split happens, right where exercise science largely goes down the road you were talking about with Nick and working out in incredible detail the physiological pathways that are involved in muscle fatigue and durability. Only recently have we started to look back and say, oh, wait, a minute, remember some of those studies on central mechanisms, and there were others that dribbled out along the way. There's some work in the 1960s on strength and so forth, but it was the lunatic fringe. Now, with the psychobiological model, basically what we have is a modern and I think, a modern restatement of what Malso and a number of others in history have really put together. So you have the emergence of original not trying to think of the years, but I guess it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:But Tim Noakes comes out with the central governor there's something in the brain that is limiting performance, and his idea is that it's something on a non-conscious level that limits us. Sam Markora comes out with what I see is a pretty similar perspective, right, and says well, it's not non-conscious. This mechanism is perception and motivation, and those are conscious things, right. That's what I see as the big differentiator between the two. And then Markora has done a lot of really beautiful experiments, sort of trying to work out the details of his model From where I sit. Look, they're both coming from the exercise science world.
Speaker 3:I'm looking at this as a guy who got a PhD in perception right and is originally trained as an experimental psychologist, then began using all these really cool brain imaging technologies in the 1990s when they became widely available. Brain imaging technologies in the 1990s, when they became widely available From where I sit. There are huge conscious and subconscious contributions or mechanisms that are at work, and so in a sense I think both Noakes and Markora are onto something and I think, really, from my perspective, this idea that we have both central and peripheral mechanisms and that the ultimate limiters that we run up against in things like an ultra, that barrier that slows us down is a malleable barrier, is as indicated, you know, or perpetrated by the psychobiological model, is not reaching our limit of the ability to do work with the muscles, but is stopping us before that.
Speaker 1:There's when you're going through that dialogue. There's kind of two categories of study that I'm reminded of. That I think illustrate that point very well. The first category is where they have blinded or rused athletes performing a task to some element of that task, and there's been a lot of these. I'm going to try to stylize them as best I can and then you can reframe it from your point of view. But they've blinded them to speed, to power output, where the end of the task actually is how good they are doing, the motivation that they receive during that task. Sometimes they'll yell at them and sometimes they'll just like sit there, you know, with their arms crossed. But some construction of the task that they are doing whether it's a time trial, a time to exhaustion test, a VO2 max they kind of manipulate the situation and see what the difference is in the outcome of the actual task. And the summary of that is that whenever they have blinded or rused the athlete into it, typically they can do more work than they thought they could. So a great example is okay, you think you're doing a 40 kilometer time trial on a bike, right? You see the ticker kind of count down 30 kilometers to go, 20 kilometers to go, 10 kilometers to go, three kilometers to go, two kilometers to go, one kilometer to go, and there's this kind of spike in performance, this epic, you know, kick to the finish line and things like that, and then the researchers say, no, you're not done yet, you have another kilometer and there's some reserve there, right. So they've kind of rused the athlete into when the end of the task is and there's something left, there's something left over.
Speaker 1:The other category of experiments and there's a recent meta-analysis that Sam Markara was a part of, that you were just mentioning is where they've actually used a pharmacological intervention to block the sensations going on at the level of the muscle or the level of the nerve, so that none of that input kind of reaches the subject super spinally. And what they find, by doing that is, is there's no change in the subject's rating of their perceived exertion. So let's think about this for a second right. You're doing a cycling task or you're lifting weights or something like that, and you do, you know, you go through your exercise and you say, okay, that was, you know, a six out of 10. That was kind of moderately hard.
Speaker 1:Well, let's block the signals, all of the physical signals, kind of coming back to the brain using some form of pharmacology, right, a nerve block or even an end would kind of do the same thing.
Speaker 1:The kind of do the same thing the subjects have the same rating of perceived exertion when they're doing that exact same task, which is actually kind of remarkable, right, you would think that you know in Yen's, to quote Yen's Voigt, if you could actually shut your legs up, that you would perform better, right? But here there's a relatively robust category of research that would go to say that even when you can do that with a very powerful pharmacological intervention and nerve block, the rating of perceived exertion at least like how you are perceiving that effort doesn't change at all, or maybe just even just a little bit. And once again, I think that goes to kind of like reinforce your earlier point where we're just starting to recognize the fact that these inputs that are coming in, where we're perceiving things to be hard or fast or towards the end point or whatever, they influence our ultimate work capacity to a great extent, and maybe even more so than the underlying physiology.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I guess I would say that those things, again, those things are based in physiology, right, and I know this is a hard thing to think about. But, like you and I are having this conversation right now, I'm seeing you and hearing you, you're seeing and hearing me, you're having thoughts and so forth. All of that is a product of physiology, it's all a product of brain physiology, and so your perception of effort is a very complex thing. That is based on incoming sensory information that you're getting, let's say, those nociceptors, right, that are giving you feedback from the muscles that have now been blocked at the spinal level in a lot of those studies. So we could take that out of the mix.
Speaker 3:But there's still something going on that is predicting effort, right, and what is that? Well, there's still a descending motor command, right, and there's probably based on what we think we know about the motor system, a copy of that command that is usually being matched against the incoming sensory information to gauge effort and so forth, and inference copy, also, something dating back to the late 19th century and hermeneutic. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But but there's also prediction. We're constantly predicting forward, right? So we're taking in all this multisensory information, we're interpreting it based on past experience. What we think is going on in the current situation right, and our expectations about what we're going to need to do in the future All of those things are being calculated in our brain and they're truly physiological states of the brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm getting a kick out of your mention of prediction because I've maintained the opinion that endurance athletes are pretty terrible at it and they get more terrible at it the longer the duration of the task actually goes. So I went over some of the studies earlier where they'll blind the subject to the end of the task. Right, they think they're ending here, but they're really ending there and there's always some sort of reserve, right. So that goes to that predictive ability. I think that I'm going to squeeze out every last little bit of effort before this point X. But you can't do that because even when they extend X by 5% or 10% or whatever, there's some capacity left over to bring a an example a little bit more home to people in the ultra marathon world.
Speaker 1:We see this play out on the race course when people drop out and immediately regret that decision and what they're going through in their mind. Marathon world we see this play out on the race course when people drop out and immediately regret that decision and what they're going through in their mind many times not all the time, but many times is I'm at mile 70 and I feel like this I have 30 miles to go. I'm extrapolating how I'm feeling at the present moment to 30 miles later. I don't think that's a tenable situation. I don't think that I can handle it. I'm going to drop out. And we see this play out like time and time again in ultras, where they make the decision, they get their wristband cut and they immediately regret that decision 10 minutes later because, lo and behold, they feel a lot better, right. So they have erroneously extrapolated or erroneously predicted how they would feel 10 minutes after, whatever they were kind of like feeling at the time. Okay, let's take a quick break in the action and hear from CTS coach Neil Pallas on this very aspect.
Speaker 4:I tell athletes that our brain's job is to protect us and so it's going to be sensitive things like physiology, safety, sense of belonging and even self-worth, and a lot of times it's going to be wrong on that accuracy of the data it's getting and that's where the perception piece is so big and we think of those things as just this filter and so it's going to be skewed by those factors. But let's get those basic things absolutely wired. Let's get physiology wired, let's get our sense of safety wired. What do we need to eat? What do we need to do to feel safe? Even on a deeper level, where things can go wrong is that sense of self-belief, feeling like an imposter, or that general sense of belonging. Those things our brain is constantly searching for and that could be big as well, and we need to be able to deal with that head on upfront. Like I mentioned, feeling hungry, tired, exhausted, threatened by the elements are going to warp that perception and our job as coaches and athletes is to help override what it's telling us.
Speaker 1:This notion of prediction, or performance prediction or exertion prediction, however you want to put it I've actually viewed it as one is we try to hone it as good as we can with athletes and encourage them to do certain things in training, but at the end of the day, even with really good athletes, the data says they're not all that good. They're not all that good at it.
Speaker 3:No, they're not and that's why you referenced earlier this notion of people, you know, sprinting the last 400 meters of their ultra or whatever. You can go back and people have done this and look at you know marathon times, boston marathon times, and look at people who are approaching the finish around some really nice marker like 245 or three minutes or three hours, rather right. Those people show a much more, a much quicker final mile right because they're trying to get in under that barrier. So clearly they had reserve left in the tank. It's all the time the situation. It makes a much quicker final mile right Because they're trying to get in under that barrier. So clearly they had reserve left in the tank. It's all the time the situation. It makes biological sense to protect oneself in that way, but it can. It is a malleable thing.
Speaker 3:So one of the things I do with athletes when in working on this is not. I take some of those manipulations that people have used in the studies you're referencing and I use those in training with athletes. So I say you know, we're going to go hard, we're going to get together. I usually do it in a bike sort of situation where it can be tethered together in the world of Zwift or something, and you're not going to know how long you're going to have to go hard. Right, I'm going to let you know when this is up, but you need to go all in because it could be that I let you off the hook in five minutes or it might be seven minutes.
Speaker 3:Right, there's a big difference between that. When you're really pushing hard, that's the nature of actually road bike racing. Right, you've got to stay in the draft and other people are setting the pace and you have no idea how long the suffering is going to go. But the key to winning a race or doing well, is holding on to the draft, right, and being able to stick with it and get yourself through and work through that belief that this is going to be like this forever, because it's not right. It's just that you don't have control over it. I know so. I try to expose runners to that kind of that kind of situation because I think there's really value in doing that in training.
Speaker 1:I know a lot for the intensity or the time for the next circuit whenever they come back around. So to your point of they're introducing unpredictability they don't know how long the particular intensity that is going to be assigned is going to last. Is it going to last for one loop or two loops, or four loops or half a loop? Is the whole workout going to last for one loop, two loops or four loops or anything like that actually becomes a really good exercise and a lot of people will think that just sounds, you know, sadistic or something like that, because you're, you know, kind of like torturing the athlete without letting them know. But it's actually like a psychological tool to introduce that unpredictability in order to kind of like teach this some sort of flexibility with not solely. I guess the way I'm trying to articulate this is not pigeonholing yourself into knowing when the task is actually going to end. Maybe you can eloquate that a little bit better than I am in terms of how that would actually result in a performance improvement.
Speaker 5:Okay, let's hear from CTS coach addison smith on this as well one of the ways I like to insert unpredictability into training for my athletes is using something like over under workout, something popularized by renato canova. Ryan anderson really loves using these one of our cts coaches and really for athletes this is a great way to shake up the normal work hard and then have predictable rest into a specific training session. So something like a four times six minute threshold, followed directly by four minutes at steady state zone three or lactate turn point one, and then having four minutes of recovery makes the athlete really have to juggle with the idea of they're not just at a certain rpe and then they have to turn their braids off and recover. They really have to struggle with a point of dialing back slightly some intensity, figure out what that rpe might look like when they're already under some fatigue, already under some duress, and then go back to recovering again.
Speaker 5:And this is a great way to prod an athlete that has had success in the past with a normal block of training.
Speaker 5:They kind of know the routine of work hard, then rest. Maybe they're ready for an injection of some additional stress and stimulus. Or this is someone who's racing at the top end of a trail race, an ultra race, and they need to get used to the high intensity bursts or moves that are made throughout a race and learning how to cover them. Learning how to surge, learning how to then settle back into a rhythm and knowing that they can handle that when you know starts to move hard on a climb in the middle of a race. So I really like using that for experienced athletes. But for athletes that are more beginners, getting the principles of rest and recovery and understanding the workout is paramount and then, once they've kind of gone through that cycle, they can start to learn a few new things about how to dial in the right RPE, add in some unpredictability or learn how to manage a race setting where they're trying to battle for tough spots in a race.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the key here is that we're working on the model that your performance is being limited by perception of exertion and that pacing is based on your estimations of how long you can dole out that energy that you have available to you.
Speaker 3:But that pacing algorithm becomes a lot more complicated when there's an unknown variable, such as when you're reaching the finish line or how long in an interval session you're actually going to get to rest. It's another way to play with that, right, and so what you're doing there is you're in some very simple way to think about. It is you're getting athletes to be comfortable with uncertainty and willing to take risks, and I think that's when breakthroughs happen, right. If you're playing it safe all the time, you're being too conservative. You're never going to push a little bit deeper and a little bit further and find out where that limit for you really is, and I think an athlete at a given level of fitness, that limit is a band, it's not a line, right? There's a swath of possibilities there and, as people who want to optimize performance for themselves or for others, getting people to take risks, to step a little deeper into that band, is where it's at right.
Speaker 1:Well, and it becomes particularly important in ultramarathon, not to, you know, degrade the rest of the endurance sports, but because there is such a big gap between the known and unknown, and I've described this any number of different ways to athletes and coaches and things like that. If you take your prototypical marathoner, they're going to do a 20 mile, 18 mile long run, right, which is 60, 75% of the total distance that last 40 to 25%. They can conceptualize that because it's 10 K, right, I mean that's the go out, do a 10 K run. That's an easy thing for them to put together in their mind. I've done this in training. I have this leftover, this piece that is leftover, I can get kind of a good grasp on and, you know, put those pieces or at least try to put those pieces together.
Speaker 1:Ultra is kind of completely different, especially for people that are like newer coming into the sport, where there's, where there's not only a huge distance unknown, there's also usually a huge time, unknown as well, which can be double what their longest training run is. You're training for a hundred mile race, like the blueprint I was using earlier, the person dropping out at 70 miles. Your long run might be 30 or 40 miles. You just don't have the capacity to run 75% of the distance in a training run. And even with experienced athletes who have done multiple hundred milers, that is only a small fraction of their total experience. You know you get into these really experienced people that have run 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred milers. That's still a very small percentage of their total training or their total running experience. So even in those cases, the race represents this huge, you know, ocean of unknown between what they are normally used to in training and what they're going to have to actually encounter in the race, and this skill that you just mentioned just becomes that much more important in those contexts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it's trainable. I really do, and in ultras it is a unique situation I can see. My longest ultra run was 50K, which I know has probably most of your listeners snickering, saying barely not even you know it was a marathon with a warm down, but yeah, I think these things are trainable, right.
Speaker 3:And that gets me to thinking, you know, about what we're doing when we're training. When we're out there training, we're training all of these things that you've been talking about in terms of muscle physiology, remodeling our hearts and so on, but we're also training our brains and we're training these systems that are creating our perceptions or doing these estimations, and those systems are both the little bit that sticks up above the waterline. You know the top of the iceberg that we're consciously aware of, but there's a much bigger iceberg of subconscious calculations and computations that are going on that are playing into that. Regulation of effort is below that waterline as well. So you're training all of those things right when you're out there repeatedly engaging in these activities, testing your limits, pushing a little bit further, and so forth.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's kind of go for the jugular on that a little bit. We've set this up with the previous podcast on durability. We understand durability is important. We're going to come in from the brain side of things and in our outline you've described a few different ways that you can manipulate the feedback that the athlete is actually going to encounter. Why don't we kind of go through the categories of those first and then a scenario where they might actually execute it? We talked a little bit about it in this. Hey, we're going to manipulate the duration or the intensity of the interval and kind of like shuffle things around. But let's take a step back and just think about it structurally on the things that we can manipulate and then go down one by one on the like, the techniques that you can like literally use to accomplish that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think your division is a really good one. So the way I think about the things we can manipulate, there are feedback manipulations, which we've been talking about, right, where we can use uncertainty, deception, and we have to think about something else that's becoming more common in the running world now that's been in the cycling world for a long time which is we have all these new streams of data that are starting to emerge that are giving us perceptions that normally were imperceptible, right For the most part. So we can know something about our core temperature. Potentially we can know something about our level of blood glucose, and we can. The old one, of course, is heart rate, but now there's even power in running, and I think those are things that have potential for manipulation, but I also to advantage athletes. But I also see them as having a flip side, which is, you know, we, when we talk about manipulating that boundary of how far you can push, it's not just a one way street, which is, you know, when we talk about manipulating that boundary of how far you can push, it's not just a one way street, man, right, we're going to get more out of it. We can manipulate it in the other direction too right. We can do things to compromise the athlete's ability to go further and I wonder sometimes about whether we're doing that with some of these additional streams of information that we're adding in. The brain has a limited bandwidth for conscious perception and processing and we can measure that we've done it for a long time in terms of our conscious awareness attention we also talk about that in terms of working memory has a limited capacity and the more we load people up with, the more potential that has to oversaturate them, which could also which could lead to decreased performance.
Speaker 3:So one of the things practical with the athletes I work with is I am I'm kind of rigid about saying you know, I don't mind if you use your trying to think of a way not to tweak too many noses, but very popular monitors that people are using aura and whoop in these things. They have a place, but I don't want you wearing that thing for, like, the week of a big event. I just don't want you doing it because there's nothing good that can come of it. Really, I think if it gives you data saying everything's good to go well, that should be your default assumption. That should be something we've got established anyway, as you're tapering, to go into your big event, you don't need a whoop band or an aura ring to tell you that.
Speaker 3:Hopefully you don't get sued over this for me, but it's kind of our job, right to deliver up the athlete in the most ready status they can be. Of our job right to deliver up the athlete in the most ready status they can be. But what if they do have a travel interference and you know, crappy night of sleep and it's pouring rain for two days before the big trail marathon or trail ultra? They're not going to get a good readiness score right and what's that going to do in terms of their ability to feel able to go deep on that day? That's going to change those perceptions as well. So it's a two way street and we need to, I think, recognizing that as one of the most practical things and doing what we can to optimize the context in any way that we can, way that we can, so that an athlete is not overwhelmed with data and is able to go into the situation feeling that I've been here before, I'm confident about my ability to handle what's ahead of me and not overwhelmed with information.
Speaker 1:Can I give you? I know we're going to get into an intervention in a second because I can see you're going with this, but let me come in to that point from a practitioner's perspective who actually has to manage this across a lot of athletes in a high performance situation. First off, you're never going to offend anybody if you're going to throw some of the device manufacturers under the bus. I'm always really open and honest about how I feel about those things and I encourage the guests to be as well. There's no sponsors on this show. There never have been, so you're not going to piss me off, but there there's been a. There has been a sentiment, especially in high performance circles, around just what you have mentioned. So you have an athlete that they're training for months. They're constantly getting readiness and fatigue numbers and data from their wearables. They come into a competition and some component of their environment changes and or their training changes. They taper, they travel, might be a different altitude, different continent in many cases, and those readiness and fatigue variables that are getting measured or alchemized in some way to change right. So they change in some way and that can definitely throw the psyche of an athlete off. We recognize that, even going back to measuring resting heart rate, you know way back it was very popular in the eighties and nineties and things like that.
Speaker 1:The way that a lot of coaches and athletes have started to circumvent that is they've blinded the athletes to those numbers in competition.
Speaker 1:That's one way and that has positive and negative to it. The athlete is okay with not having that, then okay, you can get away with it. But if they've always had it during training and you take it away proximate to the race, it's kind of those you're racing different than your training, which is you try not to do that right, you try to keep those two environments as similar as possible, and so it kind of creates the opposite of what you were trying to do. You were trying to remove that stimulus initially because you know that it's going to get all gummed up and what it actually ends up doing is because the athletes are used to seeing that and used to using that as a cue that you have told them is a good cue to use. As a coach, you're now removing it. There's anxiety that can creep up because of that. I sat down with CTS coach Adam Ferdinandson to hear his thoughts on this particular aspect also.
Speaker 2:Well, as far as managing athletes' relationships with their data, I probably spend more time working with the perspectives and attitudes around that data than maybe actually working with the data itself. For example, a lot of athletes come in, they start working with me and they really like to pay attention to their heart rate data and usually the direction I go is de-emphasizing a lot of this data. There's a lot of reasons it can be misleading or not the right tool and not the best use case all the time. But a lot of that comes back to. I see so often athletes have a negative reaction to that data and oh, the run felt great.
Speaker 2:But look at my heart rate values and I'm not always sure exactly what they're even looking at or what their ideas are around it, but I see it play a negative role more often than not. Same thing with HRV and metrics like that, where people are so quick to look at the negative days and maybe less quick to look at the good days. So I try to balance that out. And one more piece that I'll add is that what I'm most interested in as an athlete is how are you feeling so if we're going to talk about HRV or what your resting heart rate was that day. I'd really like to also hear how you're feeling, and more often than not that's not brought to the table initially in those conversations.
Speaker 1:So quick question on that, adam how do you specifically manage all of the data that Strava gives you, either comparing yourself to yourself or yourself to others, because that's something that instantly comes up anytime that you upload a run? Is you always have your third on this climb and 20 seconds faster or 40 seconds slower or whatever? It's nearly instantaneous feedback? How do you manage that component of it, because a lot of times that's getting to the athlete even before the coach has a chance to analyze things? Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 2:I think I like to direct us towards the benchmarks that we can control. So maybe that's interval performance, Maybe it is a race that they've done every year they do the same 10K race or something like that and look at those more clean examples where we're really looking for improvement. There's always going to be a Wednesday loop that wasn't as fast as your loop was two years ago. I think that there's so many variables in that situation that we can't control. I'd much rather look towards where we can control it. But I also have a lot of athletes that are racing a former version of themselves, maybe when they were younger or something like that, and that's very difficult to manage. And I don't profess to have all the answers there, but you kind of just got to be honest and open about it that in certain situations those past performances may just be. You know, it may be very likely that you're not going to top those again and I hope you like training in the meantime.
Speaker 1:So, personally, what I like to do not in all cases but in many cases is I just take a lot of time to educate the athlete on what those numbers mean. Every day we talk about it, every week we talk about it. When they go into like test races we talk about what they mean and so that way, when they actually see whatever kind of comes up for those scores close to the race, they're armored with information and they're armored with the context around that and it has the. It just has less of a chance of kind of rattling, of kind of rattling them. The other strategy that I've heard that you're going to love and you've probably seen this going back to manipulation is to manipulate what the athlete is seeing and give them a positive number somehow so they would take the morning measurements or they're going to get their night heart rate variability or whatever kind of goes into it in some way deceptively, without the athlete knowing and I have known people that have done this without the athlete knowing they introduce a positive number or something that is going to they think is going to elicit a positive psychological response in the days leading up to the race and when I first saw that or when I first heard of it I'm like you know what? That's? Actually kind of clever, like. I can appreciate that.
Speaker 1:But you only get one bite at that apple. You got one chance, you get one. You better play it well. You get one shot and if you had an athlete that was doing one competition and that was it, maybe you've got a use case scenario for that. But since they know that you rused them once, that ruse is unlikely to work later down the line. And even if you don't ruse them, they're always going to wonder it. So you might create a negative situation later down the line. And even if you don't ruse them, they're always going to wonder it, so you might create a negative situation later down the line. So anyway, I bring all those up as a little bit of context for the entirety of the story. With some of these wearables that we've recognized some of the overstimulation that can actually occur when we're looking at them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think one role on a practical side for coaches is to really think hard about how much information is helpful for an athlete to have at any given time, and that may well depend on the athlete and the nature of how the coach approaches things Something you said I think is really important here in training versus racing and trying to keep those things similar right. So I think there would be, if an athlete is feeling very strongly or coach is feeling very strongly about something like heart rate variability, I think it would be really good to for an athlete to get comfortable performing on days when their readiness score is good and when readiness score isn't so good and see that it is possible for them to go well on a shitty night of sleep, for example. You know a lot of famous athletes have terrible nights of sleep before races and it's still quite possible to go out there and have an amazing performance and I think learning about you know that and having that experience in training is important, yeah, so that's why I take the monitor away.
Speaker 1:typically it would have to be away for a week, yeah, before an important event, you know just to give the little the listeners a little bit of a window to how I personally how I use some of these systems very practically, especially for my elite athletes, is I just have them use an app that's really popular, it's HRV. For training. They take a morning measurement, it's paired with a subjective questionnaire and it gives them kind of a stoplight system for the day. You know green, go ahead and do it as planned, yellow is avoid intensity and red is kind of take the day off. I will say that I'm less sensitive.
Speaker 1:Some people are kind of laughing myself, but I'm sure the audience is going to laugh just because they know my personality. I'm less sensitive to adopt those, to adopt those suggestions, because I realize that I do want the athlete to be able to perform when they have something adverse in front of them, and in almost all cases they can. That's not to say that I never take those. I will look at that every once in a while and pair it up with the rest of the context and say, okay, let's push this workout around or let's manipulate the training here or there. But I realized that we can't let the physiology and the subjective questionnaire kind of rule everything, that there are other contexts to what we want the athlete to improve on, and this is what we're kind of going through is exactly one of them, where you're going to have to be able to perform when things aren't perfect. That is just part of the gig. The training and training in life are never perfect, and being able to perform when they're imperfect is actually quite a skill.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think another way of just kind of going with what you're saying is there's the data, right, but then there's what you think about the data, and I would say that what the athlete thinks about the data is probably having a pretty major effect on their performance, potentially in either direction, and that's an important consideration as we're moving further and further into the realm of more and more data. Okay, so let's drill more into the feedback in either direction, and that's an important consideration as we're moving further and further into the realm of more and more data.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's drill more into the feedback manipulation piece of it, right, Because I know a lot of athletes will kind of recognize this as a failure point within their own racing where they get to a point and they're overtly focused on one thing their pace right their time that they come into an aid station with. And there are absolutely interventions that you can do in training to help that athlete overcome those situations or different permutations of that in a race. Why don't you go through some of the things that you're like practically doing with the athletes to kind of hone them in on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I can give you one example and this, I think, is probably something you've used at one time or another.
Speaker 3:But I had an athlete who's a really great trail runner and he had a race that was basically straight up a mountain and down the other side, and one of the things that we're working on is getting him to take risks right.
Speaker 3:So we reframed the race. It wasn't an A race, it was like a B or C level race for him and I told him to race as though the finish line were the top of the climb, the top of the mountain, when in actuality he still had about a third of the race left after that. And take that risk. And I was confident that if he got to the top and he ran as hard as he could to the top, paced it out as though that's the finish that he'd get down the other side, and he did. He had a big win actually. Now, that could have gone south, right, it could have blown up, he could have crashed and that would have been OK. We are willing to take that risk on that day for him to see a little bit deeper into his capacity, and I think it actually worked well.
Speaker 1:Okay, here's the final break in the action.
Speaker 1:I sat down with all of our coaches and let's hear some of their thoughts, okay, so I wanted to bring everybody back here to talk about this specific component of what data do we actually incorporate during a race, and my first exposure to this was back when I was coaching a lot of cyclists and power meters just started to become prevalent out in the marketplace and one of the things that we started to do immediately was to cover up the head unit of the power meter during a race so that the athlete wasn't biased towards what they were doing, because many times they could actually exceed their power output and race as compared to training, because they're tapered and it's what they've kind of like amped up for and all the adrenaline of the race and things like that.
Speaker 1:But we recognized immediately that some data has the capability of holding an athlete back. Yet other data is useful to actually help meter out the effort and how to perform better, and I was wondering if you guys could come in as coaches to provide some just like tips and framework for the athletes out there that are going to go out during a race. They've got all this, all these things that they could get from their, from their smartwatch or their GPS watch. How do you advise athletes on what data is useful for them to track? And we're going to start out with you, addison.
Speaker 5:For me, I love telling my athletes that, because the trail and ultra race has so many variables already added into the fold and things that you need to adjust for on the fly, whether it's weather or terrain or certain climbs, simple is better when it comes to having internal data or watch data that you're following throughout the course of a race, and so I think the biggest thing that an athlete can take with them throughout the course of a race to meter out their effort is just using an RPE talk test, for example.
Speaker 5:The Leadville 100 is a very long race.
Speaker 5:There's a variety of climbs, you're at a variety of altitudes, you're going to be experiencing a lot of different weather conditions, and so if you can, throughout the course of a race, just internally listen to yourself breathing, try to talk to someone on the trail, that's going to give you a good idea of where you are in terms of your overall effort.
Speaker 5:And if we set your training up right and your preparation plan up right, you should know whether that's a sustainable effort to continue to run over the duration of that race or for a specific client effort to continue to run over the duration of that race or for a specific climb. So, for example, in the Leadville 100, around 15 miles into the race, you have the powerline climb. If you're a middle of the pack runner, you should be able to talk comfortably to someone next to you. You shouldn't be breathing deep and labored because there's a heck of a whole long way to go and you want to set yourself up for success, and so an easy way to do that is to just internally take 30 seconds to really get a feel. For how am I breathing, how am I talking? If you're talking and it's not very hard you know that you're doing the right thing and setting yourself up for the rest of that hundred mile race.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, since you mentioned Ludville, we got to bring in Neil for this, because it's something that he's pretty familiar with. Neil, what do you have to say?
Speaker 4:Well, you know I'm going to start with the pieces to ignore is number one what other people are doing. You know how far ahead they are, especially if you have a long way to go in a race. You know the longer distance, the further you are from the finish line, the less it matters. The closer you are to the finish line, the more concerned you can be, depending on the level of racing you're doing and your goals. You know. Here are some things you have to pay attention to have you peed in the last couple of hours. What color is your pee? Knowing that physiology, is the pain you're feeling like a tearing, ripping or scraping, or is it a general ache? You know there's other pains you don't have to pay attention to Some you do.
Speaker 4:Again, like Addison, I always go back to RPE. You know, or does it feel like nine and you have one mile to go? Know where you are in that race matters too, because if you have less to go you can go harder, ditch the heart rate in a lot of situations. And, like you said, coop, on the bike. I've biked Leadville a number of times in the power meter, turned on my power meter one year and it just wasn't working and just went and that was one of the best rides I had. So it was. You know that. I think that's key Listening to your body and learning, learning from experience what those signals mean, which I think that's key, and that's why we do some of those long hard runs as training runs too, and just getting that experience.
Speaker 1:Adam, what do you want to add into the mix here?
Speaker 2:One thing that athletes are going to look to to evaluate their performance mid-race is going to be time splits at certain aid stations or landmarks, and that's something that I've been doing more and more lately is seeding those expectations, and it can play into when we are predicting race times and predicting what those splits might be.
Speaker 2:It usually looks like I'm seeding those expectations that these splits are for planning purposes, for time between aid stations, nutrition and things like that.
Speaker 2:They won't necessarily have a high level of precision enough to go into an aid station and say, oh, I'm five minutes behind, I need to hurry up, my race is going poorly and on the flip side, that plays into how are you choosing that potential time? A lot of people will want to put their A goal at the forefront. Everyone has a pretty aggressive A goal, typically maybe something that's possible on the very best day, and I think the psychology is pretty hard to get around that if you come into an aid station and you're still having a good day but you're not on those splits, for most people you're still going to have a negative response. So a lot of times I might have them base their plan off of more moderate or conservative splits, so then they see those signs and say, hey, I'm ahead of the plan and that feels good. Because I think it's hard to see behind the plan and feel good in that context.
Speaker 3:I've mentioned already that the playing games. I like the bicycle, I like the indoor trainers where you have a lot of control over the situation for this, where you can play games with pacing, with power output, with duration and interjecting uncertainty. You could equally choose to interject deception into that, but it's not been the way I've approached it. I think this uncertainty factor is a great one. Again, it's what bike racers have to learn to do. Road bike racers. That's just how it goes. You know, I was talking with a friend who was a former world tour racer and he was saying I cannot tell you how many times I was felt that I was at my limit and I popped only to notice that the pace backed off in the group that I needed to stay with to with to be in it for the win. It backed off within the next five seconds, and then the question is could you have gone another five seconds right? Probably so.
Speaker 1:those are some of the things that I think could be brought in, that are a little unconventional, that could be brought into the running world right I'm trying to think about so this is me getting selfish on the conversation, and all in an effort of full disclosure, scott, I'm trying to think about how I could do this from a remote setting. So if I wanted to introduce uncertainty right With a trail runner that I worked with and I'm located here they're located in California or whatever how could I construct a workout that had some level of uncertainty to it, cause ultimately I've got to prescribe it, go out and run two hours, right, so that's certain to be the two hours I'm just trying to figure out, like, how I would actually do that Well.
Speaker 3:that's why I use the indoor trainer, because now we have these indoor training apps, right you?
Speaker 1:got to help me out here, come on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm telling you, I think well, here's what I think I I'm doing this with runners, right. I'm making them get on the indoor bike, and I like the indoor bike for getting getting in work. That is, you could call it cross training, but it's still benefiting them in a lot of ways, without impact, right, so they're minimizing the risk of injury. The last thing I would want to do is play these games and get someone hurt right, so that they couldn't run. So I love the indoor trainer for that. But the really beauty of the real beauty of this is we can do it remotely, right. We can both get together or they can get in. I can throw them into an environment where I can control the parameters, right, so I like it for that. You might give it a try with your runners. I'm going to 100% and I get. It's not context specific. I'm sure there are ways coming down the pipeline. Wahoo just released some virtual running thing. You can probably do this on a treadmill too, right?
Speaker 1:The Wahoo. The new Wahoo treadmills look absolutely amazing, and it's actually something that I've wanted to see, or a couple of their features, or some things that I've wanted to see on treadmills for a long time, the main one of which is the belt. Speed will automatically adjust based on where the runner's position is on the belt, so if you think about you know normally doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's actually, really it's.
Speaker 1:I mean, I can't believe people haven't done it yet.
Speaker 1:And this is we're going off the rails with this conversation, but I'm going to stay on it just for a little bit and people will check it out. You think about the normal way that you would manipulate the speed on a treadmill is you have to push a button. I'm doing eight minute miles and I want to do six minute miles. I got a beep beep, beep, beep and then turn the thing up and then the belt adjusts based on that input. Here there's a way that the treadmill can sense you actually speeding up or slowing down and the belt actually adjust to that. So you're running an eight minute pace and then you start running a six minute pace and the belt adjusts automatically. So I'm sure, with context to introducing some of this, there could be the same type of run, a show that you're using with the trainer, on, on on some of these new treadmills, and I imagine some creative coaches are going to, you know, jump all over that once they start to get out into the get out into the space.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's very exciting, I mean. Another thing that comes to mind to kind of veer, to kind of move forward, and thinking about this is kind of hearkening back to what we talked about in the beginning, if you think about the work I was describing at the start of our conversation, saying that mental fatigue actually does affect physical performance. And, yeah, okay, maso was the first to show that, as far as I know, late 1800s. But there have been other studies replicating that down the line. I just saw one, for example, saying that had a nice design, and they showed that social media use within 30 minutes of a workout causing mental fatigue. Right, mental fatigue went up. Performance in the workout went down compared to just passive media like watching television. So there's a very practical one.
Speaker 3:What can we do to reduce mental fatigue prior to key training sessions, prior to competition? Right, so get off social media, right. So before, before a big competition, it's not enough just to taper and then spend all your time fooling around on Instagram or doing work Mental work. That's fatiguing. If you want to get the most out of yourself, you've got to taper on the mental load as well. That's tough for people. Tough for me when I taper for races. My traditional thing to do would just hunker down more on work right, which has generally been mental work, but that's probably not the best thing to do, and so thinking about ways of reducing that load, along with your physical load, and tapering both, is a wise thing.
Speaker 1:I'm familiar with that study and I actually am very appreciative of the design not to give a knock to the field that you're in, scott but I feel that a lot of the mental fatigue studies that they have done in the past rightfully so are a little bit over contrived and not based in reality, and so typically, what they would do you can more elegantly describe this than I can, so if I totally butcher it, please I'm not going to take offense if you correct me is they will.
Speaker 1:In order to mentally fatigue the mental fatigue group, they'll have them do some tasks that nobody would ever do in real life. They're doing math problems or they're solving some sort of computational thing on a screen, matching up colors to words and things like that to artificially induce this mental fatigue. And while I appreciate the basis that those studies have actually provided when we're looking at these things, it's not something anybody would actually do before race, right, but people will get on Instagram before race, people will get on Twitter before race. People will do that during their taper in substitution for training, absolutely. So the translation into this like real world application of mental fatigue is something that I'm very much appreciative now because finally we can make the link between this. We think that all this mental fatigue has an effect in these kind of contrived contexts. What does it actually look in the real world, with these substitution activities that people are actually undertaking during their tapering periods or before training or whatever?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's very hard, right. These are big challenges in our world generally how do we use our time, how do we give our mind and our brain breaks and they're not just for non-athletes and non-athletic endeavors. They really do affect our performance. So that's another practical thing that I think is fairly low-hanging fruit that people could be looking at.
Speaker 1:Can we take the opposite approach, though? So we know that mental fatigue in any race is, or any in any endurance event, is actually a real thing that people have to combat, and I will make the argument and there's research to support this that we've reviewed in our research group that it actually is a bigger component of performance than we probably actually give it credit for. Can we actually train that, though, by doing the things that we know are mentally fatiguing and then going out and performing a task? So in that way, you would be substituting the physiological capacity of the task for the improvement or the fatigue or the stress that's based on the physiology or placed on the physiology, with some sort of improvement that you can get in the mental fatigue or some sort of durability that you can improve. On the mental fatigue side of things, can we do interventions that actually would make a difference there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an interesting question and I think it's one that Sam Markora's group has dug into and they have. I may butcher the name, but I think it's called brain endurance training and I think that's the idea right, that you give people challenging tasks, and what I don't remember off the top of my head is whether they're doing them simultaneously with endurance activities, or I seem to think that there are things people did in a lab setting, but I could be wrong. One of the things about how we learn right, one of the things about about how we learn Right and what we're talking. Challenging activities introducing them during the physical performance would be the optimal way to do it.
Speaker 3:Running right again, that's another advantage for a cycling ergometer situation, right where people can be. You could envision how you might give them dual tasks, sort of situations to work on. Spend a lot of research in psychology on doing multiple things at once, dual tasking and so forth. People get better at those situations, primarily between, by getting better at switching between the two things, and I don't know why that couldn't work in this kind of context as well. I just don't know a lot about what's being done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I've heard coaches and performance psychologists alike do things where you do a set of intervals and then you do a set of intervals and solve math problems right or spell words in your head is another one that I've that I've heard of. Or if they are in a stationary, if they're kind of a stationary setting, they're on a bike or on a treadmill, they'll have some sort of matching game to play on an ipad or something like that as a technique to I don't even know how to articulate this, this is so difficult for me to to to build better capacity to resist mental fatigue. How's that?
Speaker 3:Yes, okay, and I think that's the idea behind the brain endurance training stuff too, yep.
Speaker 1:I'll link up that app. I'll link up that app in the show notes. A couple of our coaches have actually used it. Used it, Go ahead, Scott.
Speaker 3:Yeah, cool. I mean, we do know that when people are physically depleted, that cognitive performance goes down as well. So that two-way street right, we've been talking about mental fatigue affecting physical performance, but it goes the other way too, and so some of these tasks that are particularly sensitive and put you under a lot of demands for speed or accuracy or both, have a sensitivity to your recovery status, and that's something that's not been pursued that heavily, but I think there's very good potential there and that, down the line, it might be something that we see people utilizing not only for training but also monitoring recovery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all the classic studies that they've done on the military, where they've had them do either a physically exhausting task or even a sleep restrictive type of setting and then perform like marksmanship tests, is the classic way that they'll do it and then they'll have an intervention, whether it's a nutrition intervention, training intervention or whatever, and then compare, you know, series A to series B to see if the intervention actually worked. A lot of those are actually quite remarkable. You know where those interventions can be, can be extremely powerful and, as you can imagine, it's high importance to the military to be able to operate in those conditions.
Speaker 3:We're very responsive to training, and that's true for muscles and hearts, and true for brains as well.
Speaker 1:So, okay, I want to talk a little bit more on the intervention side. Right, we talked about how we can manipulate feedback potentially to improve. We talked about how some of these mentally fatiguing tasks could actually have an improvement in the way that your mental fatigue would not decay as fast or to the same extent if you did some of this training. What are some of the other brain or the central manipulations that we can make during training that would actually have an impact on an ultra marathon runner?
Speaker 3:so one that I think is an interesting and perhaps more interesting for ultra runners than it is for people who race on the track, for example is thinking hard about the warm up. So one of the things we know about pain and perception of effort is that both of those estimates, the both of those perceptions, are able to be affected by what we do immediately before them. Preconditioned right, we can take someone in the lab and we can test their tolerance for pain by having them stick their hand in an ice bucket filled with water and see how long they can tolerate it. One thing that's interesting is that people can tolerate it for longer if we've done a brief pre-exposure, so they've got a taste of what the pain is going to be like beforehand, and there are other pain studies that show this as well. I think that this is an important thing to consider when constructing a warmup routine.
Speaker 3:I know ultra runners and even marathon runners who are generally pretty casual about doing any kind of warm up and might use the first few miles of the race as the warm up, and I think that, while that might make sense from the conservation of energy and so forth perspective, they might be leaving something important on the table here. Forth perspective, they might be leaving something important on the table here. I think that it's important for athletes to get a taste of what they're about to experience in the competition or in the hard training session. So I think having a more rigorous warm-ups where you touch all of the zones that you're likely to touch during the event is important for not just muscle and cardiovascular reasons, but for preconditioning, adjusting that threshold of tolerability from a central nervous system perspective as well, and so that's something to think about. With ultra runners. It may be a hard sell to get people to do a hard warm-up pre prior to a hundred mile run yeah, let me give you the.
Speaker 1:I'll speak for the audience, right, that's, that's the hard sell here. I'll try to speak as much as I can to the audience. A lot of people will say, well, if I'm going to experience that during the race already, won't the experience during the race actually, to use your vocabulary, precondition you to the pain, the exertion or whatever that you're going to experience throughout the race, because it is so long?
Speaker 3:I suppose. So I guess my thinking has been more along the lines of wanting to be prepared for it the first time it hits. So when you first, when the dog first bites, you're not totally caught off guard and don't spiral into the sort of negative self-talk and negative thinking, and I think it can be an effective way of immunizing people, at least in part, from that shocking experience. But I see your point in something as long as an ultra. I'm often thinking about shorter things where you've got to stay with your competition in a more through accelerations and things of this nature, probably more important in those circumstances.
Speaker 1:But I think it's an interesting question, especially for people who are closer to the pointy end of the spear and ultras, where they really are having to match their competition yeah, I think that there's the better use case there of where in ultras are starting to get like this even at the 100 mile distance, where there is a lot of definitive separation in the race. That occurs through deliberate increases in intensity. And many times at least in my observation, and I'll leave that as a pretty critical caveat in my observation some of those, when those happen, the athletes have the physical capacity to handle whatever's in front of them. But there's something that that else that is going on. Either it's this perceived exertion endpoint interaction, which is a term that we haven't brought up yet but is what we were describing earlier. They're trying to forecast how they're going to feel later down the race in the present time, which we know that we're actually kind of terrible at or they're trying to pace themselves out through the entirety of whatever is going on, and that doesn't the move or the increase in intensity doesn't really fit in there in that construct. You know, I was just reminded, scott, when you went over that this sort of inoculation effect almost right that an athlete can have for future bouts when they do a little bit of a taste of that intensity. I was reminded a little bit of our conversation earlier that we had. That I'll bring up for the listeners so they don't have to listen to the entire episode in advance. You're more than welcome to do that if you want to.
Speaker 1:Where a phenomenon that we have recognized in coaching and haven't been able to explain for years is that if we give athletes workouts, hard workouts, on consecutive days, many times or or even most times, they'll perform better on the second day as compared to the first.
Speaker 1:And our physiological bias of coaching really kind of got shown when we were trying to unwind that problem, because we couldn't explain why they shouldn't have more capacity, they shouldn't be able to perform better on the second day as compared to the first day.
Speaker 1:But now that we kind of look at things through a little bit of a different lens, this uh, this uh it's almost like an acclimation process, right To the exertion or to the intensity that you actually experience, experiencing. That gives the athlete a better capacity to handle it the second time around because they're so, so, so proximate to each other. We have seen that for years in coaching and it's actually a coaching technique that I, when I started working with ultra runners, I kind of got criticized for because it wasn't as common in running, as it is in cycling and in triathlon. But now that we have a little bit of a better like framework around it, we absolutely have ways that we can describe why that might be the case. Even though the physiological capacity might be deteriorated from one day to the next, there are other things going on that might actually improve the overall capacity of the athlete that's a very interesting thing and I can relate to this in a little bit different way, thinking about when I was running competitively.
Speaker 3:My one of my staple workouts was four by one mile on the track or four by 1600. And inevitably the worst of the four in that workout was the first one.
Speaker 3:It's a shock and probably right, and probably those of you who know more about muscle physiology than me would have a lot, of, a lot of things are certainly going on, right, but this was after being well warmed up and ready to go and everything and always it would be. The second and third ones would be better. The fourth one would usually be tough, but not as tough as the first, and I often wondered how much of that was my perspective and, having recalibrated my ability to get through the misery of, you know, the third and fourth trips around the track.
Speaker 1:I just came up with a good way that we can introduce uncertainty and go out and do a set of intervals. I always come up with these crazy things when we are on the podcast. I don't do this with other guests, it's just you. I love it. It's just you. This is where we learn new things. Yeah, maybe I mentioned that this is seemingly familiar to me, so maybe it's not as original as I initially thought it was.
Speaker 1:Go out and commit to doing a duration of interval, but you don't know the number, except for the minimum number. So you're going to go out and do three minute intervals. Your minimum is four and your maximum is eight. So you have four pieces of you know, wadded up paper in your vest or whatever, and one of them says stop and the rest of them says go, and you do the intervals until you pull the one that says stop out. So you're kind of controlling. I guess what I'm thinking is you're still going to accomplish the right or an effective workload of time and intensity, but you introduce the uncertainty of whether, when it's actually going to stop, is it going to be after the fourth one, the fifth one, the sixth one, things like that and so you kind of get you can kind of kill two birds with one stone with that deal. Maybe I'll try that next week on myself and report back.
Speaker 3:I love it. It's a low tech way to do it and I could see doing it in a slightly higher tech way. You could always make a little recording for your athletes right there you go Through their earbuds. But yeah, why not? The other thing I was thinking about as we were talking there's a good bit of data on the internal voice that we all battle with when the going gets tough, and one of the interesting things from working in functional magnetic resonance imaging is looking at what's going on when people are speaking out loud versus when they're engaged in internal dialyzer right a lot of the same mechanisms are at work.
Speaker 3:Not all of them because you're not sending the motor command to articulate the sound, but because the same mechanisms are going and people can try this for themselves. If you want to shut up the little voice in your head, just start talking out loud. You can't do both at the same time. It ties up the mechanism and if the little voice in your head is giving you a lot of negative stuff that's helping to sway your perception that it's time to drop out and cut the wristband, then having something that you've pre-planned, that you can say positive to override that voice out loud, might not be a totally lunatic idea and it surely will get your competition looking at you in a very curious way and that might have value as well so maybe jens voy was right.
Speaker 1:After all, we're going to do like a 360 degree on this, him actually verbalizing either in his head or out loud shut up. Legs took up enough bandwidth so they actually did shut up perhaps I love it.
Speaker 3:I would never doubt jens the ability to suffer. I I love it.
Speaker 1:I would never doubt. Yes, the ability to suffer. I, I love it. I love that we came full circle on that. Okay, let's try to come up with some concluding points, right, yeah, we've gone through a number, like a number of different interventions and, I think, given people some good ideas of things that they can try in concert with the training that they were already doing. I think that wadded up, you know, pieces of paper that I was mentioning earlier. That was my attempt to say, okay, I'm already doing this. How do I introduce some aspect of uncertainty within a framework that I would prescribe anyway up in terms of things that ultimately limit our performance and some of the ways that we can get around that or that we can actually train to make those limiters better?
Speaker 3:yeah, I keep coming back to where we started right, that fatigue is both driven by changes in peripheral systems.
Speaker 3:So so by that I mean muscles, peripheral nervous system and central mechanisms right the brain, and that we have to respect the fact that mental fatigue has implications for physical performance, just as physical fatigue has implications for physical performance and for mental performance.
Speaker 3:And so I think that the philosophy that has been prevalent in traditional sports science, that looks only at the periphery, is limiting, both in terms of the research questions that are getting asked and in actual practice out in the field where both things are at play, and that, as coaches and athletes, we need to think more broadly when we're looking for ways to optimize performance and get serious about training some of these other systems. In using some of the tools that we've been outlining here are possible ways that one could approach that. It's early days. We haven't really got a laundry list of things we can't say well, you know, we can tell you how to work on your VO2 max and we can tell you, we can prescribe intervals that target different energy systems. We're not quite there yet, but we do have a number of ideas, in some of which we've expressed in our conversation today that people could be trying to bring in, and I think the key thing here is trying to focus on the importance of the perception and the role that plays in determining our limiters.
Speaker 1:Is perception really our reality?
Speaker 3:I think perception is very much our reality and that we're constructing it all the time, and that has been really mostly what I've done for the last 30 years is try to make little dents in our understanding of how that happens.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm going to pin you down on this question and you can hate me for it or not, but I I'm going to pin you down on this question and you can hate me for it or not, but I'm not going to let you escape without giving some sort of answer to it. A lot of listeners and include and I'll put myself in this category as a coach. One of the things I'm constantly evaluating is the strength of the intervention. So we take all of these things that we only have a limited number of things that we can do. Right, I can construct a workout, I can provide three or four pieces of instruction on that workout, and what I'm trying to do is to make sure that intervention has the maximum amount of impact that it actually can, or the maximum amount of improvement eventually that it actually can, and we have realistic framework for this right. I mean, you mentioned some of the studies that we've done.
Speaker 1:There are any number of things that look at interval intervention studies. We do a set of intervals for eight weeks. We can test the athletes beforehand, we test the athletes afterwards, whether it's VO2 max or time to exhaustion or whatever, and they improve by X right. It's usually some meaningful improvement three, five, maybe 10%, if you get really lucky where you have a really good intervention maybe not a good group or not as advanced of a group or whatever, but I guess my point with that is is it gives us context for things that we can do from a training perspective that work better than others. If you were to extrapolate what you know about some of the interventions that you just mentioned, how valuable are they in the context of everything? When an athlete is training anyway, is it going to make a market improvement in their performance? And you can draw on whatever you want to. You can draw on the research or even the practical experience that you've had with athletes.
Speaker 3:Well, here's an interesting thing to think about, and I'm going to draw on medicine and medical research because I think a lot of the ways we approach questions in sports science is based off how questions are approached in medicine. In medicine there's a gold standard for evaluating, say, the effectiveness of a drug. It's a randomized, double-blinded clinical trial. So there's the randomized people don't know if they're getting the drug or the placebo. The double-blinded part means the patient doesn't know, and neither does the person running the trial. Right, the randomized part means they don't know which group they're getting into. And so in those trials, what you see is that it sets up an expectation in the individuals who are enrolled that they might be getting the treatment Okay.
Speaker 3:So there's a great meta-analysis that pulled together almost 200 clinical trials of pharmacological agents, surgeries, behavioral interventions, for just a plethora of different medical conditions, and they looked across all those trials and they looked at how big the magnitude of the placebo response. Right, the group who actually got not the actual active ingredient. If we want to think about it in drug terms we got the sugar bill. How big of a response that group showed relative to the response that got the actual drug. Do you want to guess how, what, what. The percentage of response of the interventions could be attributed to placebo oh 98% of those, yeah, 90.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:You're an optimist or pessimist? So it's fifty four percent across all of them.
Speaker 3:But that means that, you know, if we assume that our training interventions that we're giving people are prescriptions for their intervals and long runs and weights, whatever we're doing for them, are in some ways comparable to those medical interventions and there's a lot of assumptions there, right, it would suggest that about half of the response the athlete shows is due to the overall context, and that context is comprised of several things their beliefs, their perceptions, their expectations. Their beliefs, their perceptions, their expectations, the context that your brain is creating around whatever you're experiencing in that treatment. And so I think we need to take that seriously and I think in in medical research and this is changing, but in sports science, I think it's slower to change we say, well, placebo, that's fake, right, that's not real. But think about it for a minute. Your perceptions, your expectations, your beliefs are grounded in physiology of your brain.
Speaker 3:Science is based on the notion that things happen for a reason, that there are cause and effect relationships.
Speaker 3:So there are physiological mechanisms that are causing your perceptions, causing your beliefs and so forth, and at the same time, those mechanisms are playing a role in how your body's responding to these other interventions. They're changing your and we can show this we can look at, for example, pain networks in the brain in people who actually got the placebo instead of the actual opioid, and what you see is that the pain networks of the brain are modulated in response to that sugar pill. Now you can get that same sugar pill in a different context and you can show that it'll manipulate other systems in the brain, for example, in the context of a study on dopaminergic drug, a drug that ups dopamine. These are powerful things and they're grounded very much in our biology and they affect the rest of the body, including the immune system. So I think we need to be taking that stuff more seriously and not dismissing it as fake and nonsense. Right, these effects are coming from somewhere and they're coming from biology.
Speaker 1:I'm still going to pin you down and I'm going to use the. I'm going to use context with the real. I'm going to kind of blend a few athletes that I'm working with right now to help you articulate this ultimate answer here. So I work with a number of elite athletes and they've kind of maximized their physiological capacity. I can bring them into the our lab or a nice lab here in Colorado Springs and I can test them now and I can test them three years from now and those tests are going to be almost indistinguishable despite all of the training interventions that I can throw at them. They're going to have very similar VO2 max numbers, if not exactly the same. They're going to have very similar running economy numbers, kind of on. Yet the performance can still change. So why does the performance change? What are the other variables at play that can improve performance, despite the physiology? That's what we started with, having a physiological bias and starting to kind of break out of that. How can that performance actually improve when the physiology is exactly the same and we can actually measure that? To be to be very close and this isn't just my athletes, we've noticed this a lot with elite athletes. So they learn to race is one of them. They just execute the race better. There's something on the psychological side or the brain side of things that is influencing the performance outcome to a greater extent than the physiology is, because the physiology is zero, right, that's the amount that it's actually improved. And there's another. There's a whole other types of you know themes to that or theories around why that actually might be the case.
Speaker 1:But that's how I have actually explained it to to my athletes is, yes, we're going to do everything that we can in training, but I've gotten you to kind of close to your maximum. You know we think about physiological adaptation. It has a asymptotic relationship to it. Eventually there's just no more room to visit, there's no more capacity to build right with a lot of these, with a lot of these very good athletes that have been trained, that have been training for years, and so your improvements are going to come from duties, as otherwise specified, and the training. Not that we discount the training, it's all of the other things.
Speaker 1:So, while I might be able to get 10% improvement out of an athlete, initially, just on the physical side, and that might be relatively easy, and all the other incorporations might be 2%, 1%, 5% or whatever. That's not true. After three, four, five, six years of having a robust athlete history, that physiological improvement might be 1% and all the other things might contribute to greater than that. So I kind of ask you again, like where does what we just talked about, the brain, kind of lie in that cascade of effects with an athlete and their ultimate performance? And you can once again rack and stack it to physiology, or rack and stack it, you know, with the whole athlete. But what I want to leave the listeners with is some sort of like internal hierarchy for lack of a, a better word of where this can all lie yeah, so I promise you it wouldn't be easy.
Speaker 3:No, you're brutal, I love it. Here's an experiment, a little thought experiment. If, if what you're saying wasn't true, we could just bring everyone in the lab, test them and never have the race right, just get, just give out the medals there yeah that's right and that's just not how it works.
Speaker 3:And we can. There are plenty of examples you can look at. I keep going back to cycling because cycling is just easier to define. There, you know your listeners may or may not be familiar with, there's a in cycling there's something called your functional threshold power, your FTP, everyone there's a bit cycling. There's something called your functional threshold power, your FTP, everyone.
Speaker 3:There's a bit of an obsession at the moment with athletes kind of bragging about their FTPs or trying to maximize their FTPs, as though that we're going to be the total determinant of who's going to stand on the podium. And we know it's not. It's just not true. So what other things are going on? Well, the racecraft is really important and the racecraft is knowledge and experience. Right, it's a central nervous system thing, it's a brain thing. There is the ability to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and the ability to just draw on that experience and go a little bit deeper.
Speaker 3:I could think of the first race I ran and I'm old, I'm 59 in two weeks. I can remember the first race I ran. I was 17 or 18 years old and I thought, oh my God, how does anyone do this? It's absolutely horrendous. I was so painful and I got done and I couldn't wait to do the next one. Right the story?
Speaker 3:Many of us have, but I got a lot better at going deeper, and an ability to tolerate that discomfort is something that is improved through training and through practice, and we're getting a lot of that just by the kind of training that we do, the hard training that we do in preparing for our competition. I think it's interesting to think about whether and I don't know that we have a ready set answer to the question of what's the optimal way to improve that for every athlete. There probably isn't one, just like there isn't one way to improve endurance in every single athlete or speed in every single athlete. It's probably going to be more of getting to know the athlete and getting to know how to work on that, doing some of the things we've talked about and probably a whole bunch of other things I haven't even thought about and that the field hasn't thought about yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I have athletes that are starting to put all of their sports psychology and their brain coaching actually in training peaks, and you'll find this fascinating.
Speaker 1:So the typical context is they're working with somebody on the mental side or their sports psychology side whatever vocabulary you want to use and that provider will be plugged into Training Peaks, which is the coaching platform that I use as a coach essentially and prescribe some of their stuff in Training Peaks, and I did not appreciate how remarkably effective that was going to be until after about four weeks of interfacing with it, because I knew exactly the not exactly, but I had a very good frame of reference for what the athlete was having to go through from a mental skills perspective, in conjunction with what I was prescribing from a physical perspective. And then I could reinforce that and then the practitioner could reinforce what I was doing. And so to my point earlier to. I'll pin myself down.
Speaker 1:I think in an elite athlete context, the this component that we're just talking about is as important, or even more important than the physiological gains that you can get, for two reasons One, the mental exercise that you just went through, but also the fact that the physiological capacity has a very limited room to run for whatever reason, right, just duration of the time that they've been training. They've kind of maximized their cardiopulmonary system. That part is not infinitely malleable, right To use some technical jargon. I do think that it is kind of on equal weight as compared, or even a greater weight as compared to the physiology, which is kind of a remarkable statement coming from me, having biological bias, as you very rightfully, as you very rightfully pointed out. I think that's a pretty remarkable statement.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think where this is all headed, jason, is that you know, we've known for a long time that if we want people to be faster runners, we don't just tell them to go out and run around. We give them prescriptions for structured training that has certain characteristics it's progressive, it's periodized and so on, and we could argue about what the best systems are, whether there is a best system for a given athlete, but I think that's where this is all got ahead too, because for too long we've thought that all of this other business that we're talking about now optimizing the mental side of things, the brain side of things will just naturally fall out of whatever physical training program we're having people do. And I think we're beginning to realize that's not necessarily true and that there are ways we're going to be able to optimize that as well, and that's going to require other forms of expertise, collaborating with coaches, deliberate practice.
Speaker 1:Traditional coaches. That's right. Deliberate practice, deliberate practice, traditional coaches, deliberate practice I always kind of keep coming back to that. Is is like yeah, you can improve your skill on shooting free throw, for example, by just dribbling around the basketball court and shooting shots from wherever that they can improve your free throw shooting acumen. But if you get on the free throw line and shoot 500 free throws, that's a better tool to do it. It's the same thing. You're going to get some mental skills development by running hard, running at a variety of intensities, challenging yourself and things like that. But you'll get better at them if you're deliberately focusing on them through something. And yeah, we might not have the best periodized scheme approach to it. My colleague, justin Ross, has tried to start to put this together and I think we're getting, you know, pretty reasonable frameworks based off of research and experience. We might not be able to exactly pin that down, but it's something and at least it provides a framework that's akin to the progressive overload and periodized physical approach that you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3:And individualized.
Speaker 1:Individualized too.
Speaker 3:yes, I'd love to see these kind of resources be more widely available, so that there are there are things that we could put into the hands of athletes who aren't at the tip of the spear yet. Right, yeah, and help to speed up that learning curve.
Speaker 1:100 all right, this has been fun. I'm gonna let you go. All right, man, where can I see you again? I have two final questions for you. The second, second one's going to be harder than the first one. First off, where can people find more about you and potentially work with you?
Speaker 3:So I have a small company that works on these issues and if people are interested in learning more about that, they can go to the website cerebralperformancecom, or they can email me. Scott at cerebralperformancecom, I'm happy to field questions, talk to people. We could do a free consultation. Check out what I have to offer here, whether it fits with what you're trying to do. I generally work hand in hand with coaches who are writing training plans.
Speaker 1:That's not my gig I'll leave a link to the show notes. And that, and my second one you need a book man. When's the book coming out? I'm going to keep prodding you to do this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's good. I thank you for bugging me. So I'm working hard on the proposal and it's coming together. I'm a bit of a fiend having done so many years of academic writing, it's hard for me to let it go out of my hands before I feel like it's 110%. But it's getting close and I would love to send you a draft If you're interested in looking at the proposal. I'd love your feedback.
Speaker 1:I would be honored in any way that I can facilitate that. I will gladly donate my time towards it because once again, it's a resource that is, I think, sorely needed, and you're a great kind of well wisdom in the area, from both the clinical perspective and a practical perspective. So it would be my honor and I hope a year from now we can bring you back on and we can discuss the book and when it's out there in the public and everything.
Speaker 1:Well, and we'll hawk it, we'll absolutely hawk it performance from the neck up there you go, the working title all right so yeah thank you so much for having me back.
Speaker 3:It's been a lot of fun, absolutely, scott. Thank you, take care. Bye.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Dr Fry for coming back on the podcast today, and also thanks to our CTS coaches for sitting down and letting us know how they bring some of these elements to life when they are actually working with real athletes. I'm going to bring Dr Fry back on the podcast in a few weeks, so sit tight for that one. It'll be sure to be a banger. This podcast, as always, is brought to you ad and sponsorship free, and that is so we can keep it real.
Speaker 1:If you would like to support this podcast, you have two options. First off, you can subscribe to my research newsletter, research Essentials for Ultra Running. That's a great way to show your support and also dive deeper into some of the topics that we discuss throughout the course of this podcast. You can also become a CTS athlete. I know that many of you have some big, audacious goals coming up the summer, and our crack CTS coaches are always here to help you out. If you'd like to take that route and see what our coaches can do for you, all you have to do is go to train rightcom there is a link in the by in the show notes for this particular podcast, or you can hit me up on any social media outlet and I will steer you in the right direction. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
