Latest / Run Mountain Peaks / 20+ Year Pro Triathlete John Hirsch & Last Skier Standing 2026 Reaction

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20+ Year Pro Triathlete John Hirsch & Last Skier Standing 2026 Reaction · Run Mountain Peaks

• 0:00
  All right, welcome back to another episode of Run Mountain
• 0:03
  Peaks. Today we got a good one.
• 0:06
  Today we have a good episode. I was able to sit down with John
• 0:10
  Hirsch. This guy was a pro triathlete,
• 0:15
  racing triathlons, some ultras, some trail races, shorter
• 0:19
  distance stuff, the whole kit and caboodle for 20 years, 20
• 0:23
  plus years. He had a ton of good stories, a
• 0:28
  ton of good insights, and just an awesome dude.
• 0:31
  So many crazy adventures. So we got to hear about some of
• 0:35
  his adventures and his time over the years racing as a pro
• 0:39
  triathlete. I mean this guy has been doing
• 0:41
  it for multiple decades, endurance sports at the highest
• 0:47
  level. So it was cool.
• 0:49
  We got to sit down and chat with him and he also just finished
• 0:52
  the marathon distance of the Peak Snow Devil Snowshoe race,
• 0:57
  which those races, there's not a lot of information on the races
• 1:01
  online and there's only a few finishers in the races.
• 1:06
  Like there are some years where no one even finishes the races.
• 1:10
  So we got his story from this year.
• 1:12
  He came in second and he was one of the only finishers and we got
• 1:16
  a little bit more scoop into the the Snow Devil races.
• 1:20
  So it's a great interview. I hope you guys enjoy it.
• 1:23
  I had fun doing it. And yeah, like I said, he just
• 1:26
  had so many good stories. You could tell he has just been
• 1:28
  someone who's been doing it for so long.
• 1:31
  Yeah. So it was awesome.
• 1:33
  And yeah, before we get into the interview, we are going to do a
• 1:37
  last year standing reaction. So if you're here for the John
• 1:41
  Hirsch interview, skip ahead. I'll have the time stamps, 10 or
• 1:45
  15 minutes, but if you're here for the interview, you probably
• 1:50
  like epic endurance feats and efforts and races.
• 1:54
  And one went down this weekend the last year standing.
• 1:59
  So we're going to do a quick reaction on that before we get
• 2:01
  into the interview. And then after the interview,
• 2:06
  there's a couple more ultras that I just want to go through
• 2:09
  the results on. So we have all that documented,
• 2:13
  the Tark frozen Yeti results, 30 hour, 15 mile, and then the
• 2:17
  Burke's Frozen Folly results. And at the end of that, those
• 2:24
  races, I'm going to do a trip report as well.
• 2:26
  So it'll be a lot of stuff going on, but a lot of great things in
• 2:29
  this episode. So stay tuned.
• 2:32
  Let give the John Hirsch interview.
• 2:34
  Listen for sure this guy. Yeah, it was an awesome
• 2:37
  interview. OK.
• 2:38
  And then quick before we get into the episode, we're going to
• 2:41
  do a 62nd training tip. This training tip is inspired by
• 2:45
  John Hirsch. We were talking about food.
• 2:48
  We did a little run after. We were talking about nutrition,
• 2:51
  diet foods, and he was talking a lot about the glycemic index.
• 2:56
  He says it's big on the glycemic index, looking where that is for
• 2:59
  food. So before a workout
• 3:01
  specifically, you want to have high glycemic index foods.
• 3:06
  Basically you just want something very sugary, it can be
• 3:09
  processed, something that's going to get into your
• 3:11
  bloodstream and your body's going to be able to use for your
• 3:14
  hard workout right away. A lot of the times in the
• 3:17
  morning I'll just have some sort of bar and a banana.
• 3:20
  But if I had like a banana, a bar and like an apple before a
• 3:23
  speed workout, I just bonk. I would get destroyed.
• 3:26
  It would be horrible on those days.
• 3:29
  I'm having a little bit of like a sugar mix or if there's a
• 3:32
  cookie laying around, maybe I'm having a cookie before it or a
• 3:35
  gel or something like that. You want something that you're
• 3:39
  just going to be able to utilize for energy quick and that is
• 3:41
  just like sugar, honestly, Simply put.
• 3:44
  So I cut out low glycemic index foods before speed works.
• 3:50
  No banana, no apple, none of that stuff and just do straight
• 3:53
  sugar. That's probably going to get you
• 3:55
  a better workout. OK, that was the tip.
• 3:57
  If you have any questions, go to runmountainpeace.com and you can
• 4:01
  submit a question or e-mail me there.
• 4:03
  Boom. Hope you guys enjoy the episode
• 4:06
  The last skier standing. So this event, everyone's
• 4:11
  probably seen it, heard it. It's a backyard event.
• 4:14
  Every hour on the hour, skiers skin up Black Mountain in
• 4:17
  Rumford, ME, and then ski down and you go until there's one
• 4:22
  person. Left.
• 4:23
  And this year, the event, there was a lot of hype going into the
• 4:26
  event, a lot of heavy hitters. I think the men's side had three
• 4:33
  people who had won it. So Brody Levin, Forest Ledger,
• 4:38
  and then Lucas Genulitis, a couple other people that had
• 4:42
  gone went well into the 50-60 hour mark.
• 4:45
  And then the women's side, Hillary, Hillary, McCoy, Alana,
• 4:49
  Jesse, both had won it. So there was a lot of hype.
• 4:53
  This is actually one of I think Drummond said it on his
• 4:57
  breakdown of the of the race. This is like their biggest event
• 5:02
  of the year. Lots of sponsors, lots of
• 5:04
  people, lots of people watching, lots of people in it.
• 5:08
  So it was a huge event and pretty crazy to witness.
• 5:12
  So it was a really, really cold, windy.
• 5:15
  Everyone was saying the wind was a huge factor weekend so the
• 5:19
  course record didn't go down. But Lucas Jannulitis takes the
• 5:25
  crown back-to-back defends his his title from last year at the
• 5:30
  last year standing in between those two titles, he won Bubba's
• 5:34
  at a ran 185 miles there just an absolute beast.
• 5:40
  And from the sounds of it, so the the White Mountain Ski
• 5:43
  Company did a a review or a a price race wrap up recap and
• 5:50
  they were saying Lucas just looked so good at the end.
• 5:53
  Just no one was even close to like the whole time.
• 5:57
  He was just like automatic, didn't even flinch doing fast
• 6:00
  laps. So a crazy good performance by
• 6:04
  him. And then on the women's side,
• 6:06
  Brianna Karboski, if you didn't know, now you know she goes 63.
• 6:13
  Oh, so Lucas goes 65 laps, 70,000 feet of gain.
• 6:17
  So almost three straight days. The assist goes to Brianna, who
• 6:21
  went 64 laps, so basically 70,000 feet of gain and and
• 6:29
  breaks the women's record by over 24 hours over 24 laps.
• 6:34
  The previous record was 39. I think Alan and Jesse hit that
• 6:38
  this year and then dropped shortly after.
• 6:40
  So Brianna was the lone female for over a day.
• 6:44
  Just a baller performance, beat out Brody Levin, Forest Ledger,
• 6:48
  two guys that have won it in previous years.
• 6:51
  And yeah, it just seemed like an epic throwdown.
• 6:55
  And I always love like, and these events, the backyard
• 6:58
  events, it's more just like grinding who wants it more, who
• 7:02
  can just take care of problems and just never give up, always
• 7:06
  go out for that next lap. And I think it's funny, at the
• 7:09
  end of the race, they have like interviews on the the Instagram.
• 7:13
  And both of them, they're just like, they've been going for
• 7:16
  three straight days. It's like, oh, how did it go?
• 7:18
  And there's like, yeah, no, it was yeah.
• 7:21
  Wow. I don't.
• 7:22
  Yeah, yeah, it was hard. It's like the brain is like just
• 7:26
  so done. It's like moving in slow motion.
• 7:29
  And in the in Lucas's post win, post victory interview, I think
• 7:35
  it's always funny at the end of these events, like people's
• 7:38
  brains are just like moving slow motion.
• 7:41
  They're so tired. They've been going for so long.
• 7:44
  It's almost like anti climactic where where they're just so
• 7:48
  tired. They can't be like, woo, yeah,
• 7:49
  like I won or whatever. And some people, it's not their
• 7:52
  style. But Lucas gave kind of a baller
• 7:54
  interview, and I think one of the things that I thought was
• 7:57
  the best, I think Drummond had asked him, how much longer do
• 8:01
  you think you could have went? And going into this event, there
• 8:04
  was a lot of talk about going 100 hours.
• 8:08
  I know. Yeah.
• 8:09
  Brody Levin. I didn't really know of Brody
• 8:11
  Levin. Huge following.
• 8:12
  It seems like he hyped up this race a ton and got a lot of
• 8:15
  people to come out like the big names to try to go to 100, which
• 8:19
  was cool. But yeah, there was a lot of 100
• 8:24
  talk, a lot of a lot of expectations, we will say.
• 8:29
  And in the interview, Jerome was like, how you know, how long do
• 8:32
  you think you could have gone? And I think Lucas was kind of
• 8:35
  like, you know, it's hard to say.
• 8:37
  And I think in one instance, you could take that as like these
• 8:40
  events, you never know what's going to pop up.
• 8:42
  You never know what's going to happen.
• 8:43
  Who knows how long it could have gone.
• 8:45
  But in a, in a different sense, I think you could have taken
• 8:48
  that as I was going 100. I just needed someone to come
• 8:52
  with me. I am the king, I am champ.
• 8:56
  Give me everything. Do not ever doubt me again,
• 8:59
  'cause going into this this race, I think I'm a white ski.
• 9:04
  The White Mountain Ski Company preview, Drummond was like, no,
• 9:10
  Lucas is the favorite. He has to be the favorite.
• 9:13
  And there was a little bit of like, you know, I'm sure a lot.
• 9:15
  There were so many good people coming out that everyone
• 9:18
  following the event probably had a different person that they
• 9:20
  thought could pull it off. And I think Lucas put all of
• 9:24
  that talk to rest. He is the king.
• 9:27
  He is wherever the favorites. Yeah, just an animal.
• 9:32
  And he's done last year standing a handful of time or at least
• 9:36
  three or four times and then Bubba's three or four times.
• 9:39
  So it's just like he has learned the format like a lot of the the
• 9:45
  really just people who dominate ultras, long distance ultras.
• 9:49
  I feel like it takes him a few years of racing and you know,
• 9:52
  you never start out and just win every race right from the jump
• 9:55
  and just always win forever. It take there's a little bit of
• 9:58
  a learning curve, but once you hit that learning curve and you
• 10:01
  start winning, a lot of these people just haven't figured out
• 10:04
  and just can't be beat. So we'll see how long.
• 10:09
  I don't know. We'll see if Lucas wants to ever
• 10:12
  come back. But yeah, as long as he shows
• 10:14
  up, he's the favorite moving forward.
• 10:16
  And Brianna too. I mean, Brianna had probably as
• 10:20
  if as equally impressive or not more impressive than than Lucas
• 10:25
  just because she broke the woman's record by 24 hours.
• 10:29
  It's like no woman has ever come close to her, her lap count.
• 10:32
  So anytime she shows up, she's the favorite not too.
• 10:36
  So that was the event. It was a cool event.
• 10:38
  It was a big event, fun to follow.
• 10:40
  And yeah, people throwing down. Oh, and one other thing about
• 10:45
  the the ski the White Mountain Ski Company preview podcast and
• 10:49
  wrap up podcasts. I don't know who Russ Grant is
• 10:54
  or Russell Grant on there, but. He was making me.
• 10:58
  Die laughing. I thought he had so many good
• 11:01
  jokes in the podcast. I thought he was staying in the
• 11:04
  pocket. Good timing, good delivery, good
• 11:07
  on the mic. Because I have learned that it
• 11:10
  is not easy to turn the camera on, light shining in front of a
• 11:15
  mic and land good jokes. I feel like a lot of times I
• 11:19
  feel like I'm fairly funny, can land some jokes in person.
• 11:22
  I like to joke around a lot. But sometimes when the cameras
• 11:25
  roll and I can't do it, the timing's off.
• 11:27
  It comes out weird. And I'm like, ah, I could have
• 11:29
  been, I could have said, that's so much funnier.
• 11:31
  I don't know what happened. So I thought he was funny and I
• 11:34
  wanted to give him some credit there.
• 11:35
  So shout out, but OK, that is the last year standing update.
• 11:40
  That was the race. That was the my reaction.
• 11:44
  Cool race. And now we're just going to go
• 11:46
  right into the John Hirsch interview.
• 11:49
  Hope you guys enjoy. All right.
• 11:53
  Well today we are joined by a very special guest.
• 11:56
  He is a 20 year pro triathlete, A4 time top 10 pro Ironman
• 12:03
  finisher, which is crazy, Three time world champ Spartan Ultra
• 12:09
  beast. John Hirsch.
• 12:12
  Thanks for doing this, Sean. Thanks.
• 12:13
  Thanks Elite Masters, but. Elite Masters.
• 12:17
  What I was I was in the top. I was 3rd, 7th and 10th overall
• 12:20
  so not terrible. Yeah, that.
• 12:21
  No, that's awesome. Super cool.
• 12:24
  Yeah. So I had heard about you and
• 12:26
  kind of like went down to John Hirsch rabbit hole, which we're
• 12:29
  going to get first hand today. You did the peak Snow Devil
• 12:33
  snowshoe race last month. I did in January.
• 12:36
  So I want to talk about that. But I feel like you have so many
• 12:39
  stories, probably so much background.
• 12:41
  We got to do a little background first.
• 12:43
  So where are you from? Where'd you grow up and how did
• 12:47
  you get into triathlons? Endurance training going on in
• 12:50
  that sport. So I was AI was a soccer player
• 12:54
  growing up, grew up in Connecticut, Big soccer state,
• 12:58
  ended up going to Northeastern to play soccer, didn't have the
• 13:02
  greatest career, transferred out, ended up at Division 3
• 13:07
  Connecticut college. And then when I where I also
• 13:12
  didn't have the greatest career. So when I left college, I was
• 13:15
  still kind of hungry for sports. I think a lot of college
• 13:18
  students and a lot of college athletes kind of come out of
• 13:21
  college burnt out. But I was actually came out kind
• 13:23
  of with a little bit of a like really motivated, a little bit
• 13:26
  of chip on my shoulder maybe. And and I thought I could do
• 13:29
  more. So I started messing around with
• 13:31
  a bunch of different sports. It was the heyday of mountain
• 13:34
  biking. So I ended up doing some
• 13:36
  mountain biking racing. But honestly, I was really mid.
• 13:39
  And then I was like, OK, I'm going to run a marathon.
• 13:43
  And I did OK. But again, it was still like it,
• 13:46
  it kind of demonstrated like mid potential.
• 13:49
  But I had been a surfer. So someone suggested I'd try a
• 13:52
  triathlon and I did, you know, pretty well and it, you know, I
• 13:57
  think that's the If you're not good at 3 sports, you're really
• 14:00
  good at triathlon. Yeah.
• 14:03
  So that kind of got so that after Then I found my way to
• 14:06
  triathlon, loved it, kind of got obsessed with the Iron Man and
• 14:12
  Kona. And then went to Kona in 2003
• 14:16
  and realized that if I wanted to stay in the sport because I was
• 14:19
  going into public interest as a a lawyer, I needed to make some
• 14:24
  money. So I turned pro in O 4.
• 14:28
  Then had my first kind of breakout race in 2005 when I
• 14:32
  took like finishing the top half of Iron Man Florida.
• 14:37
  And then, yeah. And then kind of, you know, kind
• 14:41
  of grind ground out. It's it's way.
• 14:43
  It's wild how fast you go from like like like 10 hours and
• 14:50
  above to sub 10 and how long it takes.
• 14:53
  You can knock off like the first hour in like a couple of years
• 14:55
  and then it takes like a decade to knock off the next hour.
• 15:00
  So I, I, yeah, it took me a while, but I kind of grinded
• 15:03
  out. And then I had my probably my
• 15:04
  best race in 2010 when I finished top 10 amongst the pros
• 15:08
  at Ironman Lake Placid. Yeah.
• 15:11
  So yeah, I think that's, and then, you know, continue to race
• 15:14
  for a long time. When I turned 40, I saw that the
• 15:18
  Spartan people at the time had an masters elite.
• 15:22
  So they had a separate division for elite athletes who were over
• 15:24
  40. And I did a couple of their
• 15:26
  races wildly unprepared the first time, which was hysterical
• 15:30
  in retrospects, I showed up with 7/7 ounce racing flats for, for
• 15:35
  for their race. I had six days to repair.
• 15:38
  I met that one of the guys who worked for them at a triathlon,
• 15:41
  in a triathlon. So where I had actually won.
• 15:46
  So he was like, Hey, you should like consider we're trying to
• 15:48
  recruit, you know, elite athletes.
• 15:49
  You should consider going over Spartan races.
• 15:51
  And he put me in touch with them.
• 15:52
  So I had six days to prepare. Literally had never done an
• 15:56
  obstacle, never done an obstacle of course race.
• 15:58
  I watched some YouTube videos, but I finished like just outside
• 16:02
  the top 20 of 1 of their major, major events in Pennsylvania.
• 16:07
  And I was like, oh, I, I think one, I was like, I'm pretty good
• 16:10
  at this too. This is really fun.
• 16:13
  And it, it felt fresh after, you know, at that point doing, you
• 16:16
  know, 15 years of professional racing in triathlon, I was like,
• 16:19
  this is going to be a blast. I need something new.
• 16:21
  I need something invigorating. You know, they were emerging
• 16:25
  markets. So there was like a lot of
• 16:26
  opportunity there. First new sponsors.
• 16:29
  And for at the time, Spartan Racing was taking pretty good
• 16:33
  care of their pro field. So yeah, thought, yeah, this is
• 16:37
  cool. I'll, I'll do this for a couple
• 16:38
  years. And then I saw that they had an
• 16:39
  ultra distance event, which they've now I think tried to
• 16:42
  make it more standard as a 50K. But back then it was just kind
• 16:47
  of all over the place. And I think some of the races
• 16:49
  were like 36 miles or whatever like that with like 70 or 80
• 16:53
  obstacles. And I would just loved it.
• 16:55
  It was like perfect for me. So the first one I did was their
• 17:00
  World Championships, I think, and I did and I was third
• 17:02
  overall and I was like, oh, this is pretty cool.
• 17:05
  So yeah, focus on that for a few years.
• 17:06
  Went back to triathlon after that to do Norseman, which is
• 17:10
  one of the like craziest Iron Man's there is an often like
• 17:15
  kind of the race that everybody does because they want to at the
• 17:21
  end of their career. He has a long history of all the
• 17:23
  top pros or not even top pros. Like, you know, I'm not the top
• 17:26
  pro, but like a lot of people, that's just such a crazy wild
• 17:30
  event that a lot of people end up heading that way at some
• 17:34
  point, even though there's, you know, you the the prize is a
• 17:38
  T-shirt. Yeah.
• 17:39
  Well, I looked. Into it a little bit, but I want
• 17:41
  to get the full story first hand.
• 17:43
  So this is what one that you did to a couple years ago, 2023, was
• 17:47
  it? 2024. 2024 OK.
• 17:50
  Yeah, 2024. Yeah.
• 17:51
  So yeah, it's it's I guess, yeah, we could dive into that
• 17:54
  story right, right off because I know you said it's pretty
• 17:56
  exciting. I saw something about swimming
• 17:58
  through packs of orcas. Is that the story out there?
• 18:00
  No, no, no, that's not that. I've never swimmed through packs
• 18:03
  of. Orcas to be.
• 18:04
  Clear No Norsemen takes place in Norway.
• 18:07
  You know that's the name, but it's famous as being like the
• 18:10
  hard, the hardest race in triathlon, the extreme
• 18:13
  triathlon. It's part of now they have their
• 18:15
  own series called Extreme Triathlon next try and it's the
• 18:19
  swim takes place in the fjord, which is like 49° you.
• 18:24
  They take you out on a boat, 4K from shore and you jump in and
• 18:28
  it's dark. You jump into freezing cold dark
• 18:31
  water. They light a fire on shore and
• 18:33
  that's what you swim towards. It is awesome.
• 18:36
  It is like, yeah, and it's it's just fantastic.
• 18:39
  So but yeah, it's real cold. It's like single digit Celsius
• 18:43
  or like, you know, 40 under 50 probably.
• 18:48
  And you can see the snow on the mountains that melts into the,
• 18:51
  the, the fjord that you're swimming in.
• 18:53
  And then you then it's a standard 112 mile bike, but
• 18:56
  there's like 10,000 feet of elevation gain and you go up
• 19:00
  onto a giant plateau that's at high elevation and there's snow.
• 19:05
  It was 36 and raining when we did that section and I got
• 19:09
  really hypothermic. And then you do a marathon, the
• 19:12
  first half's flat, but the next 13 miles takes you to the second
• 19:16
  highest peak in Norway. So it's I think like 7000 feet
• 19:19
  up. Yeah.
• 19:20
  So you then, so you've done all of that to get to the base of a
• 19:23
  7000 foot ascent. It's pretty awesome.
• 19:26
  Yeah, that is gnarly. How do you qualify for that is
• 19:29
  I'm assuming lots of people are trying to get into.
• 19:32
  It yeah they have a lottery they also have a which is very
• 19:36
  competitive they also have some spots that are merit based got
• 19:41
  you yeah at the other X Tri races now so like Canada man,
• 19:45
  which is not far from here in Vermont they have spots and you
• 19:49
  know similar to how Kona does iron yeah.
• 19:51
  Wow, that is super cool. Yeah.
• 19:53
  So, yeah, I know that is that is super gnarly and that is one of
• 19:56
  my destinations. I would love to go to Norway.
• 19:59
  Highly recommend. Love Scandinavia, huge fan of
• 20:01
  Scandinavia. Yeah.
• 20:02
  Have you been out there more than once or just for that that
• 20:05
  event? Oh, no, I did the ITU Long
• 20:09
  Course World Championships as a pro there in Denmark, so it was
• 20:12
  my first time racing there. And then I also bumped around
• 20:15
  both times I added on trips so that I could see stuff.
• 20:18
  So went to Sweden and yeah, I love that too.
• 20:21
  Yeah. So it's yeah, seems like you've
• 20:22
  been everywhere. So you've been racing pro
• 20:24
  triathlon for 20 years. One, I guess you said that you
• 20:29
  went pro or got your pro card in 2004, right?
• 20:33
  So talk to us about, I guess what does that mean so that you
• 20:36
  enter, you get to enter in all of the the pro races or the
• 20:40
  elite fields. Has it changed over the years?
• 20:42
  Oh yeah, they've changed the standards like 1000 times and at
• 20:45
  some point they changed to, they changed it so you had to re
• 20:48
  qualify every two or three years too.
• 20:50
  So it, I don't actually even know what the standards are now
• 20:53
  since I've retired, but they're pretty strict.
• 20:56
  I think you have to be in the top 5% of the top winning time
• 21:01
  of a race that has 5000 or more dollars, which, which I think is
• 21:08
  the standard. And then there's a whole bunch
• 21:10
  of others. There's like it's you.
• 21:12
  I literally am a lawyer and I would, I need to be to go and
• 21:16
  try to figure out the qualifying rules.
• 21:18
  But because there's other ways to qualify like that.
• 21:20
  Some of you can get in through being one of the top collegian
• 21:22
  racers or USAT nationals or, you know, there's like a bunch of
• 21:26
  different criterias, but they're all very, very, I mean, they're
• 21:27
  all very, very strict. When I was, when I was racing,
• 21:30
  there were 300,000 people in USAT and only 300 people had pro
• 21:35
  cards. OK, So it was, it was, it was
• 21:38
  hard. It was, yeah, the standards have
• 21:40
  never been easy. And then the re qualifying, you
• 21:41
  know, always, always was, you know, dicey, especially for me.
• 21:46
  So how, Yeah. So every couple years, was that
• 21:48
  the same back of the day? Because I know like the sport is
• 21:50
  blown up. How have you seen it change over
• 21:53
  the years? It's specifically like the pro
• 21:55
  fields. So the pro fields have gotten
• 21:57
  faster and faster and faster, bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 22:00
  The big you would see some big changes every Olympic cycle
• 22:05
  because once the triathlon got in the Olympics, every four
• 22:08
  years, you had these athletes who had been relatively
• 22:11
  supported by their Olympic teams decide to like go into, go into
• 22:18
  half Iron man's and full Iron Man's.
• 22:20
  And that would always raise the raise the raise the the quality
• 22:24
  of the racing and obviously the just being an Olympic event made
• 22:28
  it brought all this science and and technology into the sport.
• 22:33
  And that's the biggest change since I started.
• 22:36
  It went from very, you know, very theoretical, like you
• 22:43
  trained on a bunch of theories that you read in books that
• 22:45
  people hoped was accurate to now incredibly analytic data-driven
• 22:50
  training. And you're seeing that in
• 22:52
  running too, right? Yeah.
• 22:53
  So and cycling too. So I mean, it's not surprising
• 22:56
  that you're seeing it in triathlon, which is a, you know,
• 22:58
  obviously comprised largely of those two sports.
• 23:02
  So that's the biggest change is that everything now has become
• 23:04
  incredibly scientific. And as this as the sport
• 23:09
  evolves, the technology also evolves.
• 23:11
  Triathlon doesn't really hold back when it comes to
• 23:14
  technological innovation in the same way that it's like, like
• 23:16
  cycling tries to kind of slow it down, but you, you, you don't
• 23:20
  see that in triathlon. Triathlon, they're very happy to
• 23:23
  embrace new technology. So you're seeing, you know, huge
• 23:26
  gains in terms of aerodynamic efficiencies, tires, tire
• 23:31
  pressure, the aerodynamics of tires.
• 23:33
  And so you're seeing, you know, the, the, the bikes that people
• 23:36
  are going to race on, you know, this year are nothing like the
• 23:40
  bikes we raced on, you know, in 2004.
• 23:43
  I mean, it's just, yeah, it's, it's a NASA, NASA quality level
• 23:49
  of science that goes into the aerodynamics and the, you know,
• 23:53
  and the, and the, the integratedness of the rider and
• 23:57
  the bike into one aerodynamic, one aerodynamic equation that
• 24:06
  you're trying to push through the, the era, you know, now what
• 24:08
  is incredibly fast rates and speed.
• 24:10
  Yeah, no, I I feel like I see some of the top end bikes and I
• 24:13
  definitely don't know like like you know it, they just look
• 24:17
  insane like they're. Wild and also carbon related
• 24:21
  shoes is a huge, yeah, a huge change in the sport since I
• 24:25
  since I raced professionally. And then the the last one is
• 24:28
  nutrition. You know, I think, I think we
• 24:31
  used to think of nutrition as a flaw, as a has more of a ceiling
• 24:35
  and they think of it as a floor in terms of how many grams per
• 24:37
  hour. And you know, I think Iron Man
• 24:40
  has become an eating competition with with a swim, bike and run
• 24:45
  component. It's just, you know, people are
• 24:48
  just trying to they're they're realizing just how beneficial it
• 24:51
  is to to get down as many carbohydrates as they can per
• 24:55
  hour and just keep that furnace, you know, going.
• 24:58
  And it's just made the times, you know, incredibly fast.
• 25:01
  Yeah, you see it in running too like that.
• 25:03
  It's just high carb is, is one of the big trends going on right
• 25:05
  now. Just how much food can you stuff
• 25:07
  in your face? And especially with ultras, I
• 25:09
  feel like that's one of I mean, that's been a talking point
• 25:11
  forever. Like if you're doing in Iron Man
• 25:13
  2 is I think the training in the distance is similar just because
• 25:17
  a longer race you just need to eat a ton of food.
• 25:20
  And yeah, just pushing the limits.
• 25:21
  The more that you can actually absorb the the, yeah, the bigger
• 25:25
  engine fire you're going to be able to burn.
• 25:28
  Did you? So you said you.
• 25:29
  Focused on Iron Man distance. Did you do Olympic distance or
• 25:32
  did that change over your time in the pros?
• 25:35
  So when you get a USAT card you qualify.
• 25:37
  You can just jump into anything. OK, you're good to go.
• 25:41
  But I was not good at short course racing, so I quickly
• 25:45
  realized that I wasn't even really good at halves, frankly.
• 25:50
  And once the once the Olympic guy started doing half Iron
• 25:54
  Man's, everybody quickly realized that the halves were
• 25:57
  the domain of the speedsters, not the endurance guys.
• 26:00
  So really I actually, I really started to gravitate towards
• 26:05
  iron distance races and then I started to kind of almost sub
• 26:09
  specialty into like just the really hard Iron Man races.
• 26:13
  Like even the fast Iron Man races, I tended to get a little
• 26:16
  bit, I tended to lag behind. I needed really hard, really
• 26:20
  horrific, really brutal Iron Man's like Placid, which has,
• 26:24
  you know, a ton of elevation on the bike in the run or they used
• 26:27
  to run a race in Louisville in the summer, which was carnage.
• 26:32
  It was 90 something degrees and 1,000,000% humidity and you
• 26:36
  would just literally pass people who were on the ground curled up
• 26:40
  in a ball with their shoes off. Sounds like an ultra.
• 26:42
  Yeah, exactly. You know, like so that those
• 26:45
  were the races that I, I found that those were the ones that
• 26:47
  excelled at the ones that were just just hellish.
• 26:51
  Yeah, that's honestly how I kind of find myself in the running
• 26:54
  space. I think the longer and the more
• 26:57
  technical steep, that's the stuff that I like to do.
• 27:01
  So definitely kind of like a similarity there.
• 27:03
  How did you? This is something I think about
• 27:05
  a lot when I'm doing my training because everyone knows like
• 27:08
  ultra running, you have to just put in a lot of volume.
• 27:11
  And I think triathlons, like triathletes, I think put the
• 27:14
  most volume in out of any endurance athletes.
• 27:17
  So you know about ground grinding hours, especially at
• 27:20
  the Ironman distance. How did you view like getting
• 27:24
  enough volume but also keeping your shorter speed and strength
• 27:30
  like good enough to compete with?
• 27:32
  Obviously not like you know the speedsters like you're talking
• 27:34
  about, like you don't have to be able to all out of 5K with the
• 27:37
  top guys, but. How did you?
• 27:39
  Balance that in your training and did that evolve over the
• 27:41
  years of, oh, I actually don't need as much volume or I need
• 27:45
  more volume and less speed? How did you balance that
• 27:47
  equation? So the first thing and shout out
• 27:50
  to to Ben Kessel at a Priority Fitness.
• 27:53
  He, he is a absolute, he is an absolute amazing strength
• 27:59
  training coach and he would just give, he would just give me
• 28:02
  these great strength training workout.
• 28:04
  So in terms of strength, I believe strength is a thing you
• 28:07
  can do in the gym. I'm a big proponent of strength
• 28:10
  training and that's, you know, my career went until I was into
• 28:13
  my late 40s. So, you know, after 30, you
• 28:17
  really have to be getting into the gym really aggressively and
• 28:21
  you should always be getting into the grim gym really
• 28:23
  aggressively. But if you want to have a long
• 28:25
  career and you want to keep muscle mass and you want to keep
• 28:27
  that power, that's a strength thing.
• 28:29
  The Iron Man isn't who's fastest, it's who's strongest
• 28:32
  and it's who's strongest when it when it gets hard.
• 28:35
  And so I always found that that was, you know, that was really
• 28:38
  important. And I also think that's true for
• 28:39
  ultras. You know when you're you know,
• 28:42
  when you're running a relatively pedestrian pace, it's not about
• 28:47
  whether or not you have speed, it's whether or not you can just
• 28:49
  keep going. And that's a strength issue.
• 28:52
  So in terms so for me, I did start to focus more on strength
• 28:56
  as I got older. I think that's most that's the
• 28:58
  arc of most masters athletes and that makes sense in terms of
• 29:04
  speed. I always I actually did a fair
• 29:07
  amount of high end speed work consistently, but I did it
• 29:14
  almost kind of lucked into it. I love bike racing, so I would
• 29:18
  do criterions. I was a OK Cat 3, but that would
• 29:23
  also sometimes allow me to race with the the professionals and
• 29:26
  the ones and twos for anybody who knows cycling, they do a one
• 29:29
  through 5 classification. So ones are pros, twos are
• 29:33
  basically almost pros. You know, pro ends and then
• 29:38
  threes are kind of the like best amateurs and fours are kind of
• 29:42
  everybody and then fives are the newbies.
• 29:45
  So I would end, I had a category three card so I could do some of
• 29:48
  the I could raise some really fast guys and just getting in
• 29:52
  those pelotons and just begging to hang on and not get dropped
• 29:55
  was just, you know, it was these amazing all out efforts.
• 29:58
  It wasn't the most like organized intervals, but I would
• 30:02
  do that basically once a week all summer long.
• 30:04
  There was a bunch of great criterium races in places I
• 30:08
  lived and they were just these epic throw downs.
• 30:11
  So I always had an incredible amount of high, high, high end
• 30:14
  speed, even when even when I was doing super long stuff and I
• 30:22
  would just do super long stuff and high end speed, you know?
• 30:28
  Yeah. And you actually, I would even
• 30:29
  do cyclocross in the winter. I would do sometimes I would do
• 30:32
  multiple races because I would I could do you know, the 123 race,
• 30:36
  then the three four race and then, you know, the 35 plus race
• 30:40
  or whatever. And I would do so I would race
• 30:42
  an hour ride an hour race, an hour ride an hour race an hour
• 30:46
  for a 5 hour day. And it with tons of just super
• 30:50
  high end all out, you know, you know, efforts, which you know,
• 30:54
  it's kind of the new thing, right.
• 30:55
  I mean, I think a lot of people are still are realizing that a
• 30:57
  lot of high end interval training is, you know, a huge
• 31:00
  part of, you know, an elite training program at this point.
• 31:04
  Yeah, yeah, I think that's one thing.
• 31:06
  Ultra runners, I, I try to repeat it, but everyone should
• 31:09
  be doing speed work. Even if you're doing, yeah, 100
• 31:12
  miles or whatever it is, you're always going to benefit from it.
• 31:16
  What kind of training hours were you doing, like in your peak
• 31:20
  racing days? Just to give folks because some
• 31:23
  people follow triathlons, but I think this may shock some
• 31:26
  people's minds. So the biggest week I ever did
• 31:29
  was at my training camp in Spain, Strong Leg Bowl, which is
• 31:32
  coming up. Actually, it's still going on.
• 31:34
  I'm still the organizer and operator of it.
• 31:37
  But now I go just because it's fun, not because I have any of
• 31:41
  my own ambitions. We have some really fast people
• 31:43
  there and who are coming up and I love seeing them kind of kind
• 31:46
  of get better. But the biggest week I ever did
• 31:48
  was I did a 42 hour training week there.
• 31:51
  Yeah. So that's what, 7 hours a day?
• 31:53
  Yeah. 7 * 7. No, it'd be 49 seven times 6.
• 31:57
  No. Am I right?
• 31:57
  Yeah. 7 * 6, yeah. Yeah.
• 31:59
  So I average 6 hour days, which meant there were some like 8 and
• 32:03
  8 hour days in there. But yeah, it was it was a lot.
• 32:06
  Yeah. I would do like a strengthening
• 32:08
  every morning before the camp even woke up just solo.
• 32:11
  Then I would go for a run which had like, it started out with
• 32:15
  like 10 people, and then by the end of the camp there was like
• 32:18
  just me. Then we would ride like four or
• 32:23
  five or six hours and then we'd swim.
• 32:26
  Yeah, it was. It was a lot, that is.
• 32:30
  Yeah, train and eat, train and eat.
• 32:32
  Yeah, thankfully that's all we had.
• 32:35
  And we bring a chef and we, you know, we have bike mechanics and
• 32:37
  we have the whole. So all you, all you have to do
• 32:39
  is train and eat. And when you live like that, you
• 32:42
  can train a ton. I mean, I used to call it being
• 32:44
  an iron monk. I would come to well, Vermont
• 32:48
  sometimes or, or my coach shout out to Jim or tell him at the
• 32:53
  Block Island sports shop. But he would, you know, I'd go
• 32:56
  to Block Island and live in a shed and just train just like
• 33:00
  me, a shed like and and you know, my bike and that was it.
• 33:04
  And it was great. Like you can do, you can train
• 33:06
  so much more than you then you can even imagine when you just
• 33:10
  simplify it down to train and eat.
• 33:12
  Yeah, that's something that I'm starting to dabble in, like
• 33:15
  really being aware of how much like outside stress outside of
• 33:18
  training that I'm kind of carrying.
• 33:20
  And if I can shed some of that and just train more like that is
• 33:24
  just ideal. And it sounds like you did that
• 33:25
  for a long time. I did.
• 33:26
  It was really fun. By the way, it's also really.
• 33:28
  Fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:32
  Did you show full time triathlete, part time lawyer?
• 33:36
  Was that consistent throughout? Did you take periods where you
• 33:40
  didn't work or you were just always a warrior?
• 33:44
  No, I had, I always had the part time job.
• 33:46
  Yeah, it kind of prevented me from burnout.
• 33:49
  I think it's one of the reasons my career was so long is that I
• 33:51
  would usually have like a one peak season or like a false peak
• 33:56
  and then second real peak season.
• 33:58
  So I think I didn't burn out as much as other people.
• 34:01
  And then I would take like the full offseason to really focus
• 34:03
  on like getting some work done. And my job had a lot of comp
• 34:09
  time, so I would work a lot of extra days to get more vacation
• 34:13
  time. So I would end up with like 12
• 34:15
  weeks of free of vacation by the time like I really needed to
• 34:19
  knuckle down and train. And that was just perfect.
• 34:22
  Like it was a really good balance.
• 34:25
  Also the financial stress of trying to make it as a
• 34:27
  protrathlete was really not my favorite.
• 34:30
  So it just took some of that edge off too.
• 34:32
  And, you know, health insurance and boring stuff like that.
• 34:34
  But also the other part of this is I absolutely love my job.
• 34:37
  Like I just did my first Iron Man when I was a first year law
• 34:41
  student. And then I graduated and
• 34:45
  qualified and got, I had this crazy month where I graduated or
• 34:50
  not month, but I graduated. It was like over the summer I
• 34:53
  graduated, passed the bar and qualified for Kona all in the
• 34:55
  same Oh my God, in the same summer.
• 34:57
  And I was and got my first job, my dream job, which is still the
• 35:00
  job I have. So I love.
• 35:02
  I'm a public interest lawyer. I'm a public defender at the
• 35:05
  Legal Aid Society. It's one of my, it's my dream
• 35:07
  job. It's always been my dream job.
• 35:09
  So the idea of giving it up was never something I wanted because
• 35:12
  it, I loved it. And so that was easy for me.
• 35:15
  You know, balancing the training in the work life was hard.
• 35:19
  You know, being part time was really helpful.
• 35:22
  You know, we had that option because we're unionized and we
• 35:25
  have a pretty strong union and they advocated for some some
• 35:28
  real benefits like that. And yeah, without that it would
• 35:32
  have been, it would have been impossible, but I loved it.
• 35:34
  I also had a really and still do have a really a really robust
• 35:40
  coaching business. I really love coaching.
• 35:43
  I've always had that as the as part of what I do.
• 35:47
  You know, I carry a maximum of 13 athletes.
• 35:50
  So, so yeah, currently I have I think 12:00 So if there's one
• 35:54
  more person out there. One free slot guys.
• 35:56
  One, one slot's open. But yeah, I love, I love, love,
• 35:59
  love coaching. I always loved coaching.
• 36:00
  And that was always a really good way to, you know, integrate
• 36:05
  this, the freedom of coaching and travel and training and
• 36:09
  racing and just being able to like bring my athletes to Spain
• 36:13
  and get, you know, kind of kind of multitask my need, my
• 36:16
  training needs along with my my need to have a job.
• 36:19
  Yeah, no, no, yeah, definitely makes sense.
• 36:22
  How, how long did it take for you to get into coaching 'cause
• 36:25
  I'm starting to dabble in the coaching realm and I'm kind of
• 36:28
  looking at it like I'm sure it probably helps you one just
• 36:32
  working with other other athletes and seeing other
• 36:34
  people's training and how they respond to things.
• 36:37
  Does it did it help you with your, did you see like an
• 36:39
  improvement with your own training?
• 36:40
  Like maybe I'm doing too much right now or maybe I'm not doing
• 36:44
  enough. I need to try.
• 36:44
  Like how did coaching help your own path as an athlete?
• 36:51
  I that's a great question. I think that there are moments
• 36:55
  where I'm like, what would I say to me if I was a coach?
• 36:58
  And that definitely helps. But also being an athlete has
• 37:05
  helped my coaching in so far as like, even though I know I'm
• 37:09
  being irrational, like, for example, when things aren't
• 37:12
  going well, you know, most, most athletes will say, oh, I need to
• 37:16
  double what I'm doing. It's not working.
• 37:18
  And actually you're burnt out and you need to do half of what
• 37:20
  you're doing. So knowing that I have the same
• 37:24
  tendencies as all my athletes has really helped me be a better
• 37:26
  coach. I don't know if I actually can
• 37:30
  avoid being a, you know, an emotionally charged athlete
• 37:36
  myself. Like, I don't know if I don't
• 37:38
  know. I don't know how much coaching
• 37:39
  helps me as an athlete, but I know how much being an athlete
• 37:41
  helps me as a coach. Yeah, OK.
• 37:43
  Interesting. Nice.
• 37:45
  In terms of getting into it, I when I qualified for Kona, I
• 37:47
  realized that I would, I had done something that was pretty
• 37:51
  the the Iron Man World Championships in Kona are really
• 37:54
  hard to get into. They're incredibly competitive.
• 37:57
  So when I qualified for Kona, I realized like, OK, I'm now at a,
• 38:02
  you know, I'm now amongst a high enough level of athletes in the
• 38:06
  sport that I probably have something to give back.
• 38:09
  And I've put in so many hours of both training and learning that
• 38:13
  I at this point, I felt like I was, that I had, you know, if
• 38:18
  not a PhD, you know, a master's degree in, in triathlon at that
• 38:22
  point. So.
• 38:23
  No, yeah. So that mean that was the real
• 38:25
  turning point for me. I was like, oh, I can, you know,
• 38:28
  I'm credentialed. Yeah, what?
• 38:30
  What year did you first qualify for Kona?
• 38:32
  2000 and three, 2003. Well, actually I qualified in
• 38:35
  2002, but I qualified at Wisconsin, which because it's
• 38:39
  late, you go the next year. So I actually got one of the
• 38:42
  first qual, maybe the first qualifying spot for the 2003
• 38:45
  race. Wow, Yeah, I think that.
• 38:47
  Was the first race they were handing them out at.
• 38:48
  Yeah. What was the what was the
• 38:50
  winning or the course record at Kona back then?
• 38:54
  Do you remember? Nobody broke 8.
• 38:56
  I mean, I think, I think like mid eights would have been
• 38:59
  really good. Yeah.
• 39:01
  I mean, now it's, you know, they've demolished that.
• 39:03
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a fun event to follow.
• 39:07
  What was your Iron Man PRI think?
• 39:09
  Oh, it's not good. No, I mean, I think you're,
• 39:12
  you're going to undersell. It's it's.
• 39:14
  No, it's not. It's 927. 927 Which?
• 39:16
  Is not not that fast. I mean, now it's not.
• 39:19
  It wouldn't even be pro. I mean, you'd be I I actually
• 39:21
  had 927, I'd have trouble qualifying for Kona, I think for
• 39:27
  a competitive age group. You're also on a, a massive bike
• 39:32
  in a, yeah, heavy bike, Yeah, back in the day.
• 39:35
  But no, my results were always based on doing harder courses,
• 39:38
  like when when I that was all set on the one time I raced A
• 39:40
  relatively flat, flat, flat and fast course.
• 39:43
  The I just wasn't great at fat and flat and fast courses like I
• 39:47
  needed. You know, all my top 10s were on
• 39:49
  psycho hard courses like Placid or Louisville or whatever.
• 39:53
  Yeah, yeah, that just wasn't my Forte.
• 39:55
  I didn't, I had, I jokingly referred, you know, said that I
• 39:59
  I could do an Iron Man on a fixie.
• 40:00
  I have one gear. It was a all day gear.
• 40:04
  It was a good, it was good. You know, the race was, you
• 40:06
  know, really hard. I stayed at that one speed and
• 40:09
  could grind it out, but I just did not have that like top end
• 40:12
  speed that you needed for those. Those fast courses when people
• 40:14
  are starting to go, we're starting to go, you know, like
• 40:17
  now those courses people would all be, you know, the top 10
• 40:20
  would be, you know, around 8 hours or faster.
• 40:22
  But back then it was, you know, anything, you know, that 8 to
• 40:25
  830 and then you'd see like the, the for the winning times and
• 40:29
  then you'd see the rest of the field, the top field come in,
• 40:32
  you know, between 8:30 and maybe 9.
• 40:35
  You know, I think I, the 927 though was good enough for like
• 40:38
  11th or 12th. I think it was 11th or 12th.
• 40:41
  And I remember being kind of proud of myself and also kicking
• 40:45
  myself because I believe the if it was 11th one of the person
• 40:49
  who kicked me out of the top ten, one of them was somebody I
• 40:51
  coached. OK, So I was really proud as a
• 40:55
  coach that I coached a pro into the top ten.
• 40:57
  Yeah. Of what was actually not an Iron
• 41:00
  Man. It was well, it was an iron mid
• 41:01
  distance. It was Rev 3 Cedar Point.
• 41:04
  This was for those of you who are old heads will remember that
• 41:06
  they was a really great competitor.
• 41:09
  Iron Man came into onto the scene and they tried to pair
• 41:12
  their races with amusement parks.
• 41:14
  OK. Yeah, 'cause it was like really
• 41:16
  family friendly. It was a great idea.
• 41:18
  So that Cedar Sandusky, OH, is home to Cedar Point, one of the
• 41:22
  great amusement parks of all time and one of the great roller
• 41:26
  coasters of all time. And so you would ride roller
• 41:28
  coasters the day before and then they like gave the athletes like
• 41:31
  passes to the roller coasters. It was awesome.
• 41:33
  And then you'd race the next day.
• 41:35
  Wow, what a business plan. That was great, yeah.
• 41:37
  Super. And that like makes sense,
• 41:38
  right? Like if you have family, if you
• 41:39
  bring like your kids and your partner to some race and you're
• 41:43
  like, OK, I'm going to disappear for 9 to 15 hours, 9 to 17
• 41:47
  hours. Like that's not fun for them.
• 41:49
  But like if you're at an amusement park, that's pretty
• 41:51
  good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 41:52
  I thought it was brilliant. But anyways, they they ended up
• 41:56
  they ended up not being able to kind of compete with Iron Man.
• 41:58
  But anyways. Yeah, it's what it is.
• 42:01
  You'd mention the Xtree series, which are kind of seems like
• 42:05
  more intense triathlons like you were talking about, and so was
• 42:10
  Norseman one of those? Yeah, Norseman, their World
• 42:12
  Championships. So Norseman was the original.
• 42:14
  It was their World Championships.
• 42:16
  And then they were like, hey, people, we have a huge weight,
• 42:19
  you know, huge lottery system. We can't accommodate everybody.
• 42:22
  They also you have to have your own crew.
• 42:25
  So you have somebody drive kind of like cycling, you have like a
• 42:27
  follow car and they do your own feeds and stuff.
• 42:30
  So it's not like Iron Man where they have like or a marathon
• 42:33
  where they have aid stations. You have to be your own aid
• 42:35
  station. So because of that, they also
• 42:37
  limit the number of participants.
• 42:38
  So they really couldn't make their race any bigger, so they
• 42:42
  decided, oh, we should put these on other places.
• 42:44
  So they made a tour, the extra tour.
• 42:47
  The North America stop was in Quebec about like 6 hours from
• 42:51
  here at Lake Mini. Can you climb this beautiful
• 42:54
  mountain, like 4000 Foot Mountain?
• 42:57
  And I always loved and I loved it because I had been doing the
• 43:00
  Spartan races and I hooked on trail running.
• 43:02
  I was always into trail running. I don't I did all of my training
• 43:06
  on off road. Basically 90% of my runs were on
• 43:09
  dirt. And then so you so I really
• 43:13
  loved it because you would it really incorporated all this
• 43:15
  great trail running and the so the yeah, Canada man, I think
• 43:19
  it's, you know, that almost all of it was on dirt and, you know,
• 43:23
  including the ascent, the technical at times ascent into
• 43:25
  up to the top, up to the summit finish.
• 43:27
  That's awesome. Yeah, they almost always try to
• 43:30
  have either a summit finish or at least a mountain.
• 43:33
  I mean, that's kind of how they make it extreme.
• 43:37
  So I think for trail runners, it's a, if you're in, if you're
• 43:39
  looking for that trail runner vibe, but you're a triathlete,
• 43:41
  this was that, you know, cool vibe.
• 43:43
  Nice. Very different than triathlon,
• 43:45
  very different than Iron Man where you have a lot of Type A
• 43:47
  people who are super intense. This is much more like the trail
• 43:50
  running community of people are mellow, people are happy, people
• 43:54
  are like kind of low key when it comes to like materialism.
• 43:58
  And you know, it's just, yeah, I love, love, love it.
• 44:01
  And the people who put on Norsemen are fantastic.
• 44:03
  Yeah, that's awesome. So when did you start dipping
• 44:05
  your toes into the ultra scene? I know you said yeah, the like
• 44:11
  the ultra OCR Spartan courses, but you've done a little bit of
• 44:14
  ultra running outside or trail running I should say, outside of
• 44:19
  triathlons. Yeah, so for fun one winter I
• 44:22
  did a New Jersey trail series is a great like like low key local
• 44:27
  series not far from New York City.
• 44:29
  And I would do that. I did a bunch of their halves.
• 44:32
  I did a bunch of their I did their marathon.
• 44:34
  They do they do a crazy good winter series and they're really
• 44:38
  hardcore about the weather. So they're just like, you know,
• 44:41
  this is happening. So I did a half marathon where I
• 44:45
  was in the lead. So I broke trail the entire.
• 44:48
  Way. Oh my gosh.
• 44:50
  And it was like 6 or 6, maybe maybe 3 or 4 inches of snow, but
• 44:53
  it had frozen. So at the end of the race, my
• 44:55
  shins were bloody because I kept hitting the, the frozen snow and
• 44:59
  it kept cutting my shins. That sucked.
• 45:01
  So I did like a couple of their, I did a bunch of their races,
• 45:04
  like 10 KS, half marathons. And then they have a right after
• 45:08
  New Year's. They always do a marathon and
• 45:11
  ultra marathon at the same time along I think with a half and a
• 45:13
  10K. It's like, you know, one of
• 45:14
  those like 10K loops. So I did their marathon, I
• 45:18
  believe it or not, tied for first place.
• 45:20
  Tied for first. Me and me and me and the other
• 45:23
  guy were like, let's just let's not, let's not Sprint this.
• 45:25
  Out. Yeah, let's make this a photo
• 45:27
  finish. Yeah, at this.
• 45:29
  And that was in like pouring rain.
• 45:31
  And then I did. And then I did, I think one of
• 45:35
  their marathons and it snowed the whole time and that was
• 45:39
  great. It was like trail running, but
• 45:40
  snowed. Then I was like, then I was
• 45:42
  like, you know, I should do their 50K.
• 45:43
  So I did their 50K and that was my first, this is my first
• 45:46
  official ultra. And then I just, you know, I
• 45:48
  didn't do much until the Spartan people came knocking.
• 45:52
  And when I started with the Spartan races, I did their,
• 45:54
  their big pro thing is what they call the beast, which I think
• 45:56
  now is a 15K. But it was, you know, which, you
• 46:01
  know, it's about that. I think it was about that back
• 46:03
  then. And that was their biggest they
• 46:05
  had, that was where they like had TV stuff and prize money and
• 46:08
  stuff like that. But then when I realized that
• 46:10
  they had an ultra, I was like gone on so much more my, my
• 46:12
  wheelhouse and so much more fun and much more about what I'm
• 46:15
  about. And that's when I really started
• 46:17
  training like an ultra runner. That was when I did all of the
• 46:21
  stuff that ultra runners did because I knew I was going to be
• 46:24
  out there because when you had the obstacles, it really takes
• 46:27
  up a lot of time. So you really need to think of
• 46:29
  it as in terms of time and the rate.
• 46:31
  So you think of it in terms of running for I think, I think
• 46:34
  some of them, I looked back in recently actually, and I saw
• 46:38
  that some of my results were somewhere between like 7 and 9
• 46:40
  hours. OK.
• 46:41
  So you really need to be able to be on your feet and moving for
• 46:44
  7:00 to 9:00 hours, which is much more like an ultra race.
• 46:46
  Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's when I started really
• 46:48
  training for ultra stuff. So I was like, yeah, 2016. 2016.
• 46:52
  Was the Spartan the Spartan part?
• 46:54
  Yep. No, Very cool.
• 46:57
  Yeah. When you're training for that
• 46:58
  stuff, you talked about time. Are you doing any like obstacles
• 47:01
  for long extended periods of time or what was your did you do
• 47:04
  any unique training? Yeah, so actually I so I did a
• 47:07
  bunch of obstacle stuff like gym, which you kind of like
• 47:10
  recreating gyms like the strength training stuff for gym.
• 47:13
  So figure out like, OK, I'm going to need to real like for
• 47:17
  me it was like I had no forearm strength.
• 47:18
  So it was like, OK, I got to like work on all this forearm,
• 47:20
  some stuff. And then it was like building
• 47:23
  some of their obstacles. I was like, OK, how do you climb
• 47:25
  a rope? Bought a rope and you know,
• 47:27
  learn like learn how to climb a rope like efficiently and
• 47:30
  quickly. And then I would do like some
• 47:34
  runs where I would like mix some of that into the middle just to
• 47:38
  get good at it. But ultimately for the really
• 47:40
  for the ultra beast, it was almost easier just to work on
• 47:45
  the obstacles as one workout and then go and do I have a loop
• 47:49
  here. So now and back that's like 24
• 47:54
  miles. So I would do that like
• 47:55
  back-to-back days, you know, and it it was great.
• 47:58
  Like it went, went up a ski resort called Haystack Mountain
• 48:02
  and then across the Ridge and then it went down a mount, a ski
• 48:05
  resort called Mount Snow and then refill everything because
• 48:09
  they had, you know, you had the like infrastructure of a ski
• 48:11
  resort. Water.
• 48:13
  And then I would do a yeah, I would do AU turn and then do do
• 48:16
  it in reverse. So you got 2 good like, you
• 48:20
  know, 2000 foot a cents per, you know, per run, which I thought
• 48:24
  was pretty good, plus all the, you know, ups and downs.
• 48:26
  Yeah. And that's typically what the
• 48:29
  the Spartan Ultras are. It's usually you get a lot of
• 48:32
  vert. Yeah, they try to.
• 48:33
  I mean, they have a couple of flat ones in like the South that
• 48:36
  they just, I don't think they can.
• 48:38
  There's no hills here, guys. Like they do, I think seriously,
• 48:41
  I think 1's in Texas and one's in North Carolina or they I
• 48:43
  don't know if they still are, but they they had that.
• 48:45
  But no, they always did their big races.
• 48:47
  Killington and Vermont is still like their big, big race.
• 48:50
  Their World Championships have kind of floated around.
• 48:52
  But like, Tahoe was, there was the three years I did it right,
• 48:56
  was up in down the Tahoe ski mountain, which was like 6000
• 49:01
  feet, 9000 feet. It's up there.
• 49:04
  Wow. Yeah.
• 49:05
  So you have to deal with altitude, too, which was not my
• 49:08
  favorite. And then I always struggled at
• 49:10
  altitude anyways. Yeah.
• 49:13
  So that was a yeah. So yeah, they like up and down.
• 49:15
  Yeah. They prefer mountains.
• 49:17
  Nice, That is good. We, we love mountains.
• 49:19
  Yeah. How how often were you racing
• 49:21
  at, at altitude? Were there lots of destinations
• 49:24
  that that was something that you had to think about?
• 49:26
  Or cause I've never run at altitude, so I don't know.
• 49:28
  Like I I look at some of the races out West that I want to do
• 49:31
  eventually, but I don't know how I would do a pie.
• 49:34
  So, OK, so here's everything you need to know about altitude.
• 49:38
  It's it's so it's real, it's and it crushes you.
• 49:42
  Also, if your heart rate spikes, it tends to come down much
• 49:44
  slower. So if you, once you go into the
• 49:47
  red, you're kind of you're kind of in deep trouble.
• 49:49
  For a long time. I dealt with altitude two ways.
• 49:54
  1 is for most of my career I actually had an altitude tent.
• 49:58
  I had it because it just was a natural way to bump up my
• 50:01
  hemoglobin and it worked like I slept at 7000 feet uncomfortably
• 50:07
  like in a plastic miserable tent.
• 50:09
  It's awful. Like, it's smells, It's hot.
• 50:12
  Like, yeah, it was not cool, but it bumped up my hemoglobin from
• 50:17
  like 40 hematocrit levels from like 42 to like 4647, which is
• 50:21
  pretty big. And it meant that I could go to
• 50:23
  altitude and kind of be OK. The other way to do it.
• 50:27
  I actually did one of those Spartan races in Tahoe after
• 50:30
  that. And the way I handled it was I
• 50:33
  went at the very last minute. If you know, unless you're going
• 50:36
  to go like weeks before and get truly acclimatized, you can kind
• 50:40
  of sneak up there and then like I would go there at the last
• 50:44
  possible minute, which was I think 5:00 PM the night before
• 50:48
  the race and then the race started at 5:00 AM.
• 50:51
  So he's got one mediocre night of sleep, but the altitude
• 50:55
  sickness doesn't really start to hit.
• 50:57
  So I would do the race the next day and then kind of like
• 51:00
  retreat back down to sea level before my body got super screwed
• 51:06
  up. Yeah.
• 51:07
  And that's the, that's the if you're if that's the easy, cheap
• 51:09
  way to do it. Yeah, Yeah.
• 51:11
  I have heard that if like you're within that 24 hour block for
• 51:14
  for whatever reason. Yeah, that definitely.
• 51:18
  Yeah, but you're up there for a What most people do, which is a
• 51:20
  mistake, is they go for a few days to get to get, you know, to
• 51:23
  be on the race court, race side and see everything.
• 51:26
  Yeah. Hang out and that's like the
• 51:28
  worst time to race. Yeah.
• 51:29
  So unless you're going to go there like, oh, I think it's
• 51:31
  like a couple of weeks. Yeah.
• 51:33
  Before I love just like staying as low as possible and then
• 51:36
  sneaking, sneaking up, doing the race.
• 51:38
  And then, I mean, if you want to hang out after that, I guess it
• 51:41
  doesn't matter, but you're going to suffer.
• 51:42
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 51:43
  I always just turned around and like, drove.
• 51:45
  I literally would try to, if I, I think I would sleep there
• 51:49
  after the race because I was so shelled.
• 51:50
  But then the next morning, just get up and drive out of town.
• 51:54
  Get out of Dodge. Yeah.
• 51:56
  So the altitude tent, how often were you actually?
• 51:58
  Was that just in like big builds, some of your key races
• 52:01
  or 24/7? 24/7 yeah for like.
• 52:04
  Years, I mean, maybe I maybe I take the, the, the offseason
• 52:08
  break from it and like, but no, no, 'cause you just, no, just
• 52:11
  slept in it every night. Well, this is something that I
• 52:13
  thought about. I haven't thought about getting
• 52:15
  one of those tents, but I've been trying to be more
• 52:17
  consistent on the sauna and get some of those same benefits,
• 52:20
  like bump up the blood volume a little bit and just have it year
• 52:23
  round. Because if they say if you're
• 52:25
  doing workouts and training with it year round, you just get, you
• 52:28
  know, longer you get more workouts with that extra boost
• 52:32
  obviously. So that compounds over the
• 52:33
  years. But did you?
• 52:34
  Were you doing heat training as well or really?
• 52:36
  Yeah, because I was also racing in hot places, right?
• 52:39
  So anytime I race someplace hot, I would do heat training.
• 52:41
  But interestingly, when I race someplace cold, I would also do
• 52:44
  cold training. OK.
• 52:45
  I think a lot of because it's hard psychologically and
• 52:49
  physiologically going from hot to cold too.
• 52:52
  Yeah, you kind of want to be prepared for that.
• 52:55
  Like if the first time you're swimming in 49° water is jumping
• 52:58
  off the ferry in Norway and you're coming from southern
• 53:02
  Florida, yeah, you're kind of in trouble.
• 53:05
  So you want to avoid that. I definitely would not recommend
• 53:08
  that. So if you're going to race in
• 53:09
  cold, you need to, I think maybe it's physiological, maybe it's
• 53:12
  psychological, but either way, I think you need to do some some
• 53:15
  stuff in cold which nobody talks about, but I think that's I
• 53:18
  think that's real in terms of heat acclamation.
• 53:19
  Absolutely. So I would the race is the race
• 53:22
  leading up to Louisville where I knew it was going to be in the
• 53:24
  90s and humid. I would train indoors in the
• 53:28
  summer when, you know, sun coming through the windows and
• 53:32
  making it hot, wearing multiple layers and like on on my indoor
• 53:37
  bike, like cranking out hard workouts and just sweating
• 53:40
  profusely. I think I think it works.
• 53:42
  You know, I I did a lot of that or when I would, you know,
• 53:45
  overdress outside for runs, you know, in the, I was racing
• 53:48
  Florida and it was fall, you know, up here.
• 53:51
  So it was like 5560, perfect for a run.
• 53:54
  And I was dressing, you know, so that it felt like it was in the
• 53:57
  80s and that really helped when I went to Florida, you know,
• 54:00
  where it was still hot. So yeah, no, I think heat
• 54:02
  acclamation is critical. I just, yeah, I mean, there are
• 54:04
  some other benefits of like saunas and stuff like that.
• 54:06
  But if you want to perform, perform well, the other thing
• 54:10
  too is those core monitors. Those core temp monitors are
• 54:15
  amazing. Like people are starting to
• 54:17
  realize it's not just heart rate that you have to track when
• 54:19
  you're in the middle of a workout or a race, I should say.
• 54:22
  It's the your core temp and if you're racing someplace hot,
• 54:27
  it's just like your car. You're going to literally look
• 54:29
  down and see that your core temp's overheating and you're
• 54:31
  going to either slow down or breakdown.
• 54:34
  And all those guys now who are racing Kona, you see them all
• 54:37
  with core temperature monitors, right?
• 54:38
  They just, it's like a heart rate monitor strap.
• 54:40
  It's just an add on and it gives them their internal thermal
• 54:43
  reading and it's probably the single biggest factor in racing
• 54:48
  in a race like that. So you also saw them, like
• 54:50
  going, you know, taking extreme measures to cool themselves
• 54:53
  during races. Yeah.
• 54:54
  And you see that too in like bad water.
• 54:56
  Yeah, all ultras now are the cooling is like one of the big
• 55:00
  things to like how do you just stay?
• 55:02
  They say stay wet. All they have all the different
• 55:05
  things that they're coming out with as far as like the cooling,
• 55:08
  the white shirts, everything like that.
• 55:09
  Yeah, that's all. Yeah, The guy who won
• 55:12
  Blumenfeld, he won Kona and he won the Olympics and he has this
• 55:17
  very immodest all white kit that like he's, you know, but he
• 55:21
  wins, you know, I think he, I think he added like a black part
• 55:27
  in the most important part to to make it a little a little
• 55:30
  lesson, a little a little a little more modest.
• 55:33
  But like, yeah, that's it's all this cooling stuff is critical
• 55:36
  and it's really, you know, it triathlon has really embraced
• 55:41
  micro gains and in A and you see it like with the, you see it
• 55:45
  with the cooling stuff. Yeah, I feel like that's and we
• 55:48
  talked about a little bit, the sports are just changing like so
• 55:51
  fast. The technology is getting so
• 55:52
  good there. I mean the pros now are so
• 55:55
  scientific like Blumenthal, I think he's one of the big their
• 55:58
  camp is. So they track everything, right?
• 56:00
  Or what do you think about the one O1 VO2 Max?
• 56:03
  And we'll, we'll see what we'll see how that in time.
• 56:06
  I I am in no position to to say yes or no, but I will say the
• 56:10
  mountain he lives on, it ran up. Oh, wow.
• 56:13
  Yeah. So that mountain is in near
• 56:17
  Granada and it's right near the camp I put on in Spain.
• 56:20
  So we sometimes ride it. We don't live at the top because
• 56:23
  we're not there long enough to do altitude shading.
• 56:24
  But it's the longest climb in southern Europe in the tallest
• 56:30
  mountain in Iberia. So, so we we ride it.
• 56:35
  It's like 32 K 6000 feet in just that road.
• 56:39
  And he lives at the top right. That's he just like swims and
• 56:42
  runs in circles. He sometimes rides up and down I
• 56:44
  see on his Instagram. But I ran it and it was bonkers.
• 56:49
  I was crushed for like like 2. It like blew up half of my year.
• 56:53
  The recovery for I like I came back from that and I was just
• 56:57
  shelled so badly. I couldn't get off the couch.
• 57:00
  It was amazing. Yeah, that's all.
• 57:03
  We had another athlete actually, Jamin.
• 57:06
  Yeah, Jamin shout out to mountains and marathons.
• 57:10
  That's his, that's his, his, his, his program.
• 57:13
  And he ran up it and demolished my time and then was like, fine.
• 57:17
  He then played in snow at the top.
• 57:20
  Yeah, yeah, He, he some people can just do that.
• 57:23
  He's he comes from relatively flat places, but he's incredible
• 57:28
  at altitude stuff. Yeah.
• 57:29
  He also has the record for Mount Kilimanjaro backwards.
• 57:35
  He what? He hiked Mount Kilimanjaro
• 57:37
  backwards with a mirror and set a world record, which by the
• 57:40
  way, there was a number of attempts by other people.
• 57:42
  He his attempt was like not the first or even the second.
• 57:46
  He shattered the record by. Oh my gosh.
• 57:48
  Hours and hours and hours, yeah. What is what is the time on
• 57:51
  that, and what kind of mirror is it he?
• 57:53
  Was like, it was like faster than you might think, like 14.
• 57:55
  No, he had a like one on his headband.
• 57:58
  Yeah, yeah. But he does Kilimanjaro like all
• 58:01
  the time with his, with his, with his squad and his group.
• 58:04
  And but he ran up, he ran up the Sierra Nevada like it was
• 58:08
  nothing, which is a huge climb in cycling.
• 58:10
  And it's often the deciding race the the deciding day in the Tour
• 58:15
  of Spain. And obviously now it's famous
• 58:18
  because all these pros live there, right?
• 58:20
  Like or go there and do like extended camps.
• 58:23
  It's just tons of pros up there. But yeah, I ran up that and it
• 58:26
  so that's. So funny.
• 58:31
  That is so cool though. It was.
• 58:32
  It was fun. It was a great at the time.
• 58:34
  Yeah, yeah. Wow.
• 58:35
  So it's yeah. What are some of here?
• 58:38
  I mean, you've already gave us some snippets, but like, what
• 58:40
  are some like stand out moments from your career?
• 58:43
  It could be like awesome places you've been to or just awesome
• 58:46
  days like Graces. Like, what are some of the
• 58:48
  biggest moments when you look back?
• 58:50
  So I I had a swim in California in a La Holla in and there was
• 58:57
  like a kelp forest that was so cool.
• 59:00
  Like down. And seeing a kelp forest,
• 59:02
  there's also sea lions. I saw a before I got in the
• 59:05
  water, I saw a giant whale's tail, like, breach the, the
• 59:08
  ocean. Yeah.
• 59:10
  And then you swim over and there's like a little beach.
• 59:12
  Like you swim from these rocks. Like, you take a staircase down,
• 59:15
  you jump in. It's feels really wild.
• 59:17
  You're looking at, you're on top of a kelp forest.
• 59:19
  So you're looking down at a forest from above like a bird.
• 59:22
  It was amazing. Yeah.
• 59:24
  And then you hit like, a little, you just, like, little feet
• 59:27
  scuffle. So when you hit the beach so
• 59:29
  that you don't accidentally kick a Stingray.
• 59:32
  Oh my God. And then you turn around and you
• 59:34
  go back and that was that was amazing.
• 59:35
  I was one of my favorite, like training swims.
• 59:39
  Obviously breaking like that first top ten in Louisville was
• 59:42
  like really powerful where I was like, Oh no, I'm like, you know,
• 59:46
  I'm like I'm a legitimate professional triathlete.
• 59:48
  Like this was a long time coming and it felt really good.
• 59:51
  Yeah. What year was that?
• 59:52
  2000 and oh, that's a good question.
• 59:56
  Eight, 2008, OK, yeah, yeah, obviously the doing again,
• 1:00:02
  having the same kind of result in Placid was really, really
• 1:00:05
  amazing. I always loved the Lake Placid
• 1:00:08
  swim it it it's in Mirror Lake, which is gorgeous.
• 1:00:12
  Placid is like a sports town. Like the whole town revolves
• 1:00:16
  around sports because it's all Olympic training stuff.
• 1:00:20
  And they had the Olympics twice there.
• 1:00:21
  And you know, and the Iron Man obviously is a huge part of
• 1:00:24
  that. So being in that lake with, you
• 1:00:26
  know, the fans are huge. You know, the, the, the level of
• 1:00:29
  like noise you hear at that race is just amazing.
• 1:00:34
  I also got to do the ITU long course World Championships as a
• 1:00:38
  pro in 2012 and represent America, which is really cool.
• 1:00:44
  And also Europe goes bonkers for endurance sports.
• 1:00:48
  Like in a way that like you can't appreciate as an American
• 1:00:52
  until you go there. So they had a 7.5 kilometer loop
• 1:00:58
  through the city in the Basque Country.
• 1:01:00
  It was the city's Vic and it's a real city.
• 1:01:05
  So like it has a good population density and you're running and
• 1:01:09
  they're you're running on these like ancient European streets
• 1:01:12
  that have these giant beautiful gold seashells on the ground,
• 1:01:17
  which is because it's the Camino Tell Santiago like this holy
• 1:01:20
  pilgrimage that goes to the city, part of it at least.
• 1:01:23
  So you're running on this, like, pilgrimage site with these on
• 1:01:26
  this ornate, beautiful roads. But the crowds are like 6 deep.
• 1:01:32
  And at parts they've set up grandstands that are full with a
• 1:01:36
  Jumbotron like that shows you might be through.
• 1:01:39
  And the place is like deafeningly loud, like, just
• 1:01:42
  amazing. And you're like, this is the
• 1:01:45
  coolest experience. Like, yeah, I mean, I'd end up
• 1:01:48
  not having a great race, but it didn't matter.
• 1:01:50
  I had such a great experience. It was Oh yeah, definitely.
• 1:01:54
  That was one of those highlights.
• 1:01:55
  I was just running. Also, I had like had a bad bike.
• 1:01:58
  I think I got a flat. So I ended up having relatively
• 1:02:01
  good legs. And you know, those runs were
• 1:02:02
  just you're, you just feel like you're like not even touching
• 1:02:05
  the ground. Like there's a half an inch
• 1:02:07
  between and you're just floating along.
• 1:02:08
  It was one of those magical runs and it was and the, their long
• 1:02:12
  course was a 30K. So it was like long enough that
• 1:02:15
  you like, it felt long, but not so long that you kind of bunk
• 1:02:20
  and hit that so-called, you know, that kind of wall.
• 1:02:21
  So I just felt great the whole time.
• 1:02:24
  And yeah, just, you know, absorbing that atmosphere was
• 1:02:30
  fun, fantastic. And actually there was a race,
• 1:02:33
  Iron Man Canada, back when it was in a place called a city
• 1:02:36
  called Penticton that had a climb that was like in the race.
• 1:02:41
  And it was so, that race was so popular and such a such a big
• 1:02:47
  race and had been going on for so many years when the year I
• 1:02:49
  did it that they've the, the people would drive out there and
• 1:02:53
  line the streets like 2 or 3 deep and you were riding through
• 1:02:57
  like literally a motorcycle with space as they're just screaming
• 1:03:02
  at you like Tour de France style.
• 1:03:04
  And yeah, and it was really cool, like having the crowds
• 1:03:08
  just like screaming at you as you're like, as you're like, you
• 1:03:11
  know, climbing up this hill was absolutely.
• 1:03:14
  I love that. Yeah.
• 1:03:15
  That was really that was really, really fun.
• 1:03:16
  That is awesome. Yeah.
• 1:03:18
  So those are some great memories.
• 1:03:19
  I kind of such a long career. I wish I'd prepared that
• 1:03:22
  question a little bit, but those little ones.
• 1:03:24
  It's a big question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:27
  But yeah, those definitely, those definitely pop out as some
• 1:03:29
  of my favorite, favorite experiences.
• 1:03:32
  That's very cool. Yeah, I think some of the ultra
• 1:03:35
  runners right now cannot relate to that.
• 1:03:38
  Usually 0 crowds, middle of the woods.
• 1:03:40
  But no, that's, that's super cool.
• 1:03:43
  Did you? Were you in front of crowds like
• 1:03:45
  that a lot like how were the turn out for?
• 1:03:48
  Like it? Was a turn out back in the day.
• 1:03:50
  Oh, so for, I will say for Iron Man, they were like every Iron
• 1:03:53
  Man. But like if I'm doing one or two
• 1:03:55
  Iron Man's a year, I'm doing, I'm also doing 20 small races
• 1:03:59
  where nobody's there. Yeah, you know where you finish
• 1:04:01
  and like, you know, you, you're hanging out waiting for like the
• 1:04:05
  next couple of people to finish. So I guess I want to talk to,
• 1:04:08
  you know, there's nobody out like a lot of these races.
• 1:04:10
  And that's fun. You know, I love all those
• 1:04:12
  races. I love those small races.
• 1:04:13
  I will say I did and Tough Mudder also had an ultra
• 1:04:17
  distance and I did that race and it was they start at midnight
• 1:04:22
  and you run for 8 hours and it's as many of the five mile loops
• 1:04:26
  as you can do. OK.
• 1:04:27
  And I remember being in the middle of nowhere running
• 1:04:29
  through a field and then and this, the moon was setting and
• 1:04:34
  it was enormous. It was just like the biggest
• 1:04:36
  moon set I've ever seen. And I was just running through
• 1:04:39
  this field, having been running at that point for like 5 or 6
• 1:04:42
  hours and it was amazing. Like it was, I think of that to
• 1:04:48
  this day all the time. In fact, now I do night workouts
• 1:04:50
  just to have that experience. Like last night I did a, a
• 1:04:55
  nighttime cross country ski just because just being outside and
• 1:04:59
  like ultra runners, you know, they get to do some amazing
• 1:05:02
  things. I actually paced my one of my
• 1:05:04
  athletes at Grindstone. Oh, nice.
• 1:05:06
  I did the like overnight night. It was amazing, right?
• 1:05:10
  Like running through the Shenandoah Valley at night in
• 1:05:13
  October. I mean, it's just, it's it's
• 1:05:17
  completely magical. It's a completely different
• 1:05:19
  experience than daytime running. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it is
• 1:05:22
  awesome. I love, yeah, sometimes you get
• 1:05:26
  out in the mountains, on a trail, even daytime, night time,
• 1:05:28
  whatever. It's just you're like, wow, this
• 1:05:30
  is this is incredible. Yeah, that's super cool.
• 1:05:35
  Let's talk about the the snow devil.
• 1:05:37
  We got the snow devil. Mask, by the way, for those of
• 1:05:38
  you who are still watching and haven't, we haven't actually
• 1:05:42
  gotten to the fact that we have a devil mask here.
• 1:05:45
  Yeah, it was the closest thing I could come up with to Snow
• 1:05:47
  devil. It's actually Krampus.
• 1:05:49
  OK, Krampus it, yeah. Yeah, the so for those of you
• 1:05:51
  who don't know, Krampus is the Australia Austrian.
• 1:05:56
  He was like probably a probably a Pagan God that then kind of
• 1:06:00
  got during kind of got rebranded during Christianity and turned
• 1:06:05
  into kind of like the Christmas demon.
• 1:06:07
  So Krampus goes out the night before Saint Nicholas Day.
• 1:06:11
  And just like Saint Nicholas gives toys to all the good kids,
• 1:06:14
  Krampus goes, finds up all the bad kids, binds them in chains,
• 1:06:17
  hits them with sticks, and then, I believe, kidnaps.
• 1:06:19
  Them. Oh my God, yeah.
• 1:06:22
  And so Krampus is being is enjoying a revival at the
• 1:06:25
  moment. There's a lot of, like, called
• 1:06:27
  Krampus runs where like in Austria and other places now,
• 1:06:31
  you know, people dress up as Krampus and like, run through
• 1:06:32
  the streets and have little parades because, you know, it's
• 1:06:35
  kind of fun to celebrate being naughty.
• 1:06:39
  So there's a there's one in Vermont, right?
• 1:06:41
  A Krampus, probably, yeah. There's there's some sort of
• 1:06:44
  race that I know. Yeah, so Krampus is having a
• 1:06:46
  moment and and the race was called Snow Devil.
• 1:06:49
  So I brought the Krampus mask. Nice.
• 1:06:51
  Yeah, Nice. Yeah.
• 1:06:52
  And wore it around for the before and after the race.
• 1:06:54
  Yeah, not during. Not during, not during.
• 1:06:57
  It would have been way too hard, yeah.
• 1:07:00
  OK, so the snow level in Pittsfield, Vt.
• 1:07:03
  Pittsfield, Vt. Which is the home of Spartan.
• 1:07:06
  OK so this race I would have done.
• 1:07:08
  I did not know this when I signed up but or I knew it as I
• 1:07:12
  was signing up. The story of Spartan in comes
• 1:07:15
  through Vermont and at this farm in Pittsfield is where they
• 1:07:19
  created the Death Race, the Snow Devil and a few other of these
• 1:07:23
  early races that they now refer to as the founders races.
• 1:07:27
  From that Spartan launched and became whatever Spartan is.
• 1:07:31
  So the founders of these like you know the the Ogs of this
• 1:07:34
  still keep like some of their like original races.
• 1:07:37
  So they still have the Death Race, which was going on
• 1:07:38
  simultaneously. I did see that.
• 1:07:40
  Which is bonkers if anybody wants to just pure masochism.
• 1:07:44
  I saw that. I saw which I would cross paths
• 1:07:46
  with them both before and during the race, which and seeing them
• 1:07:50
  out there just they've been out there for days.
• 1:07:52
  Like the our race started Saturday morning.
• 1:07:54
  They their race started Thursday.
• 1:07:56
  Yeah or yeah, it's wild. Yeah, well, isn't like the
• 1:07:59
  waiver like if I die die, they they post something like that on
• 1:08:02
  their Instagram or something? Yeah.
• 1:08:04
  Yeah, I mean, they were like, they start by jumping into a
• 1:08:06
  frozen river to retrieve their bibs, which are frozen in ice,
• 1:08:10
  like it's that kind of thing. And then anyways, and they also
• 1:08:12
  had 100 Miller and 100K that started Friday.
• 1:08:15
  Yeah. By the time my race started,
• 1:08:18
  everybody from 100 Miller had dropped out and everybody but
• 1:08:20
  one person from the 100K it dropped.
• 1:08:22
  Out. Wow.
• 1:08:23
  Yeah, OK. I mean, it was cold.
• 1:08:26
  It was like this kind of cold, by the way, it's I think it was
• 1:08:29
  -5 when you rolled into my -5 Fahrenheit when you showed up
• 1:08:32
  here. So it was like that kind of
• 1:08:35
  weather the night before. So they had been like, it would
• 1:08:39
  been zeros, you know, overnight. So those dudes were out there
• 1:08:42
  running, you know, those, those poor souls were out there
• 1:08:45
  running through the night. Yeah.
• 1:08:48
  Yeah, I can see why they had a high DNF rate.
• 1:08:49
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:08:50
  Anyway, so our race started at the very leisurely hour of, I
• 1:08:53
  think, 8:00 AM. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:56
  And that's so it's in Pittsfield.
• 1:08:57
  It goes up and down a 1700 foot course that goes that
• 1:09:02
  incorporates their like local little their local mountain.
• 1:09:05
  I don't know what it's the name of the mountain is, but it's.
• 1:09:07
  Yeah, Yep. And you did the marathon, right?
• 1:09:10
  I did what was it loops or was? It so it's 4 loops, 4 loops and
• 1:09:14
  the trail was pretty nicely. It's a snowshoe race.
• 1:09:16
  You have to wear snowshoe to save criterias of what that
• 1:09:19
  entails. And then you have to go up.
• 1:09:23
  Yeah. And then just four times you
• 1:09:24
  summit the mountain four times, essentially take a windy course
• 1:09:27
  up and then a windy course down. And that's it's a 6.5 mile loop,
• 1:09:32
  which made according to my watch was way long.
• 1:09:34
  But yeah, whatever is what it is.
• 1:09:36
  Yeah, it's the same for everybody, Yeah.
• 1:09:38
  I should have said you came in second.
• 1:09:40
  I did so. I had a good run there, not bad.
• 1:09:41
  What was the the turn out? How many people were in that
• 1:09:44
  race do you know? No idea.
• 1:09:45
  No idea. There was a crowd when you
• 1:09:47
  started and then you left. Started and there was a lot less
• 1:09:50
  people when we finished. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:51
  So the race has an insane cut off.
• 1:09:54
  Yeah, I you had mentioned that in your write up.
• 1:09:56
  Yeah, it had a really strict cut off.
• 1:09:58
  Right. So don't do that race if you
• 1:10:00
  want to finish all of it unless you can go pretty fast, you will
• 1:10:05
  not make the 4th lap cut off unless you're pretty good.
• 1:10:09
  Like I made it sprinting and I, I, which I, I and I was, I
• 1:10:14
  actually was, this was originally going to be a zone 2
• 1:10:17
  workout for me to get ready for my Spain camp at the which which
• 1:10:21
  starts at the end of the February.
• 1:10:23
  And so I was like, oh, perfect. I'll do this as like a zone 2
• 1:10:25
  workout. And then I like, I got kind of
• 1:10:28
  competitive. I got into the moment and I was
• 1:10:30
  holding what was like, you know, solid zone 3 for me, like and
• 1:10:36
  like pretty, pretty solid zone 3.
• 1:10:39
  And I took the first two laps that way and then realized that
• 1:10:43
  somebody that I was in my head racing was actually doing the
• 1:10:45
  half and they were finished. So as I started the third.
• 1:10:48
  Lap Psych Yeah, I'm not going to back out as.
• 1:10:51
  I started the third lap. I realized I was like, oh, I've
• 1:10:52
  been kind of cooking. I should back off.
• 1:10:54
  But then I did the math and I was like, I'm not going to make
• 1:10:57
  the cut off. And then I went back and I saw
• 1:10:59
  the remembered the results I'd seen and I couldn't understand
• 1:11:02
  why only like one person would finish.
• 1:11:04
  Like if you look in like 2 the year before 2020, I guess it'd
• 1:11:08
  be 2005. One person finished.
• 1:11:09
  And I couldn't figure out why so far.
• 1:11:11
  It must be that, you know, this race is so hard or people,
• 1:11:14
  locals sign up who don't know what they're getting in for.
• 1:11:17
  I don't know. Now I realize, oh, it's the cut
• 1:11:19
  off. So I go back up to like zone 3
• 1:11:23
  like and now I'm like 3 1/2 hours into running at what for
• 1:11:29
  me was 160 beats per minute. And I'm like and then as I get
• 1:11:34
  close I'm like, I'm not going to make it.
• 1:11:36
  I literally was in a all out lactate threshold Sprint for the
• 1:11:41
  last 10 minutes to get to the finish line.
• 1:11:44
  I make the cut off exactly within with 30 seconds.
• 1:11:47
  Like I don't even if they had been strict about it, it was
• 1:11:50
  exactly at 1:00. Now they had started 5 minutes
• 1:11:53
  late so I but they said 1:00 so I at 1:00.
• 1:11:58
  Between one 1:00 and 1:00 O1, I crossed the timing mat.
• 1:12:02
  Oh my gosh. If they had been like if they
• 1:12:04
  had, I was worried they were going to pull me from not making
• 1:12:07
  it between 12:59 and 1:00. But they gave me that like
• 1:12:11
  minute grace. Then the third place guy gets it
• 1:12:14
  and thankfully, like talks his way into a fourth lap.
• 1:12:17
  He's like, you guys started 5 minutes late.
• 1:12:19
  Yeah, yeah. I made the, you know, I've been
• 1:12:21
  on pace to make it by one. Had you started on time?
• 1:12:24
  I think he even got in around 1:00 one O 4.
• 1:12:27
  So yeah, so and I only know this because we chatted afterwards,
• 1:12:32
  but yeah, so then I went out and I was definitely cooked for that
• 1:12:34
  last lap. That last lap was and I didn't
• 1:12:37
  think anybody was behind me because I'm like, oh, I'm the
• 1:12:39
  last guy. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to go
• 1:12:41
  as slow as I want. I just got to get.
• 1:12:44
  To the end. I just got to the end there's
• 1:12:45
  nobody behind me. Luckily the other guy did the
• 1:12:47
  same thing and also was completely cooked and didn't
• 1:12:50
  didn't come closer to me. So we ended up we both we like
• 1:12:54
  had had we known that we could have like we yeah, who knows
• 1:12:58
  what would have happened. How do you know how demolished I
• 1:13:01
  was? He could have put in a little
• 1:13:02
  bit of effort and then we both would have been really, really
• 1:13:04
  miserable. Yeah, just a tiny bit faster and
• 1:13:06
  you could have broke me. What was your ending time for
• 1:13:11
  that like? Over 7 hours. 7 hours, yeah.
• 1:13:13
  For the yeah, I was, I averaged 140 for per lap for the first 3.
• 1:13:18
  So that's three hours, right? Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:13:21
  So I was at 3 hours no. 3 1/2. Yeah, no, three.
• 1:13:27
  Oh my God, I can't believe I'm doing the mass so poorly.
• 1:13:29
  NO34340. No, that would have been 320.
• 1:13:32
  So 420. That was at 4:20.
• 1:13:34
  Boom, you heard it here. I have no idea.
• 1:13:36
  Anyways, I'm not doing them. I need a calculator to do this
• 1:13:38
  because it's not. Working in my head, it was cold
• 1:13:40
  out there. It was cold.
• 1:13:41
  So anyways, I went much slower. I think the last lap was like 40
• 1:13:45
  minutes slower. But again, I was like moseying,
• 1:13:48
  taking it all in and it was gorgeous.
• 1:13:50
  So like I'm like on this beautiful course.
• 1:13:52
  Now at this point, all of the 10K people are gone, the half
• 1:13:54
  marathon people are gone and the marathon people are basically
• 1:13:57
  gone. There's one guy ahead of me and
• 1:13:59
  I didn't know it, but one guy behind me.
• 1:14:00
  So I'm just like enjoying this, like nice stroll up and down
• 1:14:04
  this mountain. Yeah, that's awesome.
• 1:14:06
  Well, that explains the event because when I was looking into
• 1:14:08
  it, I like there were a couple years that maybe there was only
• 1:14:11
  one year with results on ultra running Matt or something.
• 1:14:13
  I'm like, what is this? I can't, I don't know anything
• 1:14:15
  about it, but it's a founders race.
• 1:14:17
  What's going on? So it's cool to hear hear some
• 1:14:20
  of that. And obviously I was like, it
• 1:14:21
  must be you have to wear snowshoes.
• 1:14:22
  It's like because I call it a snowshoe race even if it's
• 1:14:25
  packed down. What were you?
• 1:14:27
  What were you wearing for snowshoes?
• 1:14:29
  That's a good question. I have fancy snowshoes.
• 1:14:32
  There's two brands, and I can't remember which one I ended up
• 1:14:35
  that are like the fancy snowshoes.
• 1:14:37
  I have a pair of Dion's. Yeah, so.
• 1:14:39
  Dion's is Dion's is one of the fancy brands and they're
• 1:14:42
  fantastic. I think I have the other one
• 1:14:45
  just because they were on sale. OK, there you go.
• 1:14:47
  But. By the way, if Dion wants to
• 1:14:49
  hook me up, I will 100% wear Dion's because.
• 1:14:52
  They're from Vermont. Yeah, Vermont.
• 1:14:53
  I know. So I want to.
• 1:14:54
  I want to support Dion's. I just unfortunately they
• 1:14:58
  weren't running the sale at the same time that the other brand
• 1:15:00
  was. Hey, Yeah, yeah, You got a
• 1:15:02
  business decision, you have to make it.
• 1:15:04
  No, that's cool. Yeah, No, I love the Dion's.
• 1:15:06
  They Yeah, that's it. They're they're like a local
• 1:15:08
  company. I think I had a when I first got
• 1:15:10
  one or I don't know if I had a problem or something, but I
• 1:15:13
  emailed them and they responded right away.
• 1:15:14
  So yeah. No, everybody says they're the.
• 1:15:16
  Everyone says they're they're great.
• 1:15:18
  Yeah, that's what a lot in the in the 4000 footers a lot of
• 1:15:21
  people will will be wearing those that makes sense run
• 1:15:23
  around on the trails which I think today are we going to have
• 1:15:27
  to we're. Going to run Haystack, the
• 1:15:30
  backside, not the ski side, which actually goes to the true
• 1:15:33
  top, The mount, the ski resort doesn't go to the true top.
• 1:15:35
  So we're going to look down off that outfit.
• 1:15:37
  It'll be really great. But the the trail is up the
• 1:15:39
  backside and it's pretty padded down because it gets a lot of
• 1:15:43
  attention. My guess is we could wear micro
• 1:15:47
  spikes or we could but or we could bring snowshoes.
• 1:15:50
  I'm would definitely say we bring both yeah.
• 1:15:52
  And see when we got there, I'm not.
• 1:15:54
  They got a little bit of snow recently, but it's been a while
• 1:15:57
  since good snow has fallen here, so.
• 1:15:58
  OK. Did you guys get snow yesterday?
• 1:16:01
  Like a. Like a dust thing.
• 1:16:02
  Yeah, we got like Southern New Hampshire got like 6 inches plus
• 1:16:05
  there yesterday. Yeah.
• 1:16:06
  And just kept snowing. Yeah, So did Rhode Island
• 1:16:08
  didn't. Yeah, and southern New England.
• 1:16:09
  But no, we didn't get that. So my guess is that the trail's
• 1:16:13
  in probably pretty good shape and crampons will be, I mean,
• 1:16:16
  you know, micro spikes will be fine.
• 1:16:17
  Love to hear it. That's always the dilemma.
• 1:16:19
  I bring them both and I hope for yeah, just bikes, Yeah.
• 1:16:23
  Do you do any peak peak bagging? Do you get on any of the the
• 1:16:26
  mounts? No.
• 1:16:26
  Don't I'm no, it's a cool, it's a cool thing.
• 1:16:30
  I just I got I had a daughter recently and that I was racing
• 1:16:35
  professionally, so I couldn't do a lot of the bucket list stuff I
• 1:16:37
  wanted to do because I had to kind of do the races that made
• 1:16:41
  sense as a pro. And then now that that I'm like
• 1:16:43
  retired, I'm like, I get to like one a year.
• 1:16:48
  Hey, there you go. Like I get one cool thing a year
• 1:16:50
  and this year it was snow Devil. Nice.
• 1:16:53
  Oh, and I'm going to give a shout out.
• 1:16:54
  I also do the tiathlon, a triathlon in Mayo Pack, New
• 1:16:58
  York, named after a kid named Ty who died of cancer.
• 1:17:02
  And I love the race. It's the best small community
• 1:17:06
  race you'll ever do. The town all knew the kids.
• 1:17:09
  So like, the fire department comes out and helps the police
• 1:17:11
  to come out and help the cheerleaders from the local high
• 1:17:14
  school. The whole thing's a fundraiser
• 1:17:15
  for the Ty Lewis Campbell Foundation, which is a a
• 1:17:19
  nonprofit in his name to help fight childhood cancer.
• 1:17:22
  It's an awesome race. So I get to do that race and it
• 1:17:26
  seems like one other event one choose.
• 1:17:27
  So I get to do 1 bonus and this bonus was the snow devil.
• 1:17:31
  Sweet. When is?
• 1:17:32
  When is that race? Usually like mid-september.
• 1:17:35
  Mid-september. Very nice, very nice.
• 1:17:39
  One thing I want to ask you, I I got I got AI got a list here.
• 1:17:42
  I was like, I think I can know I know most of this stuff, but I
• 1:17:44
  want to make sure I don't I don't have some things that we
• 1:17:47
  missed. One thing that I I saw in one of
• 1:17:49
  your posts, you said in your 20s you did a bunch of different
• 1:17:53
  sports kind of trying stuff out, found triathlon.
• 1:17:55
  Your 30s, you tried to reach your athletic potential.
• 1:17:59
  Maybe chasing Kona was in there too.
• 1:18:01
  And then your 40s was kind of like still, I mean, you're still
• 1:18:04
  pro racing in this whole journey, all these stories like
• 1:18:08
  looking back, what would you tell yourself, 28 year old self
• 1:18:12
  about to embark on like, because I feel like I'm an assumable,
• 1:18:15
  like I'm, I really want to try to see what my athletic
• 1:18:18
  potential is. What would you tell yourself
• 1:18:22
  knowing what you know now? Is the journey, the destination?
• 1:18:25
  What do you think? Well, that's.
• 1:18:26
  Yeah, I mean, that's odd. That is I would say yes, but
• 1:18:29
  also keep it like there are real consequences to pro racing.
• 1:18:33
  And I don't want to under score the fact that like somewhat like
• 1:18:37
  I think about that when I took 10th at Louisville, there was a
• 1:18:40
  guy there who was an kind of also like an up and coming pro
• 1:18:44
  and he had just had a kid and his I remember his partner and
• 1:18:47
  kid were there and we were chatting before the race and I
• 1:18:51
  passed him to take the 10th spot.
• 1:18:52
  And that was at the time the last paid spot.
• 1:18:55
  I never saw him again. Like that result was the
• 1:18:58
  difference for of me going on to continue racing and having this
• 1:19:01
  living the dream. And that dude, like, I don't
• 1:19:04
  know where he went, but like his dream was over.
• 1:19:06
  And like that that's real. Like, I don't want to say that
• 1:19:09
  the you know, it's all about the journey because race results
• 1:19:12
  matter. You know, sponsors care, you
• 1:19:15
  know, race results put you in a place to run a coaching business
• 1:19:20
  or how much you might charge and that's like food in your kids
• 1:19:23
  mouth. That's gas in your car.
• 1:19:24
  I don't I don't want to be flippant and just say that, you
• 1:19:26
  know, but but on the other hand, I can't.
• 1:19:31
  I did the Block Island triathlon almost every year because my
• 1:19:35
  family lives on Block Island. My coach shout out again to Jim
• 1:19:37
  hotel at the Block Island sport shop.
• 1:19:39
  He's out there. So I would go and do that race
• 1:19:41
  almost every year, one time six days after Iron Man, like
• 1:19:43
  plastic. And I cannot tell you the years
• 1:19:48
  I won and didn't win. It just doesn't matter.
• 1:19:51
  I can tell you the joke I made to Jim during the race when I
• 1:19:55
  when I caught his wave and swam under him and waved.
• 1:19:59
  And that's the memory. Like, I don't know.
• 1:20:01
  Did I win that year? I have no idea.
• 1:20:02
  So the winning and the losing didn't matter on either.
• 1:20:06
  So don't. You know, enjoy the journey, the
• 1:20:10
  journey is fantastic and have a blast, but you know, and soak it
• 1:20:16
  in. But you know, also be mindful
• 1:20:17
  that the the you, it is like, you know, the results matter.
• 1:20:20
  You know, I'm sure winning that race was good for me.
• 1:20:23
  Like I had local sponsors, I had local support.
• 1:20:26
  I'm sure, you know, whenever you try to like sell yourself
• 1:20:31
  coaching some, you know, coaching, a great way to do it
• 1:20:34
  is be the person who won the race and then tell people you
• 1:20:37
  have a coaching business. You know, I'm sure I got
• 1:20:40
  athletes by winning the race and then hanging out after the race
• 1:20:43
  and talking to people. And you know, that's not people
• 1:20:46
  wanted. People are impressed by the
• 1:20:48
  person who's first or second or third or has the good results.
• 1:20:51
  So I don't, I don't want to say that the that the the
• 1:20:54
  destination doesn't matter, right?
• 1:20:55
  Like, yeah, yeah. I don't you know, another thing
• 1:20:59
  too that you had mentioned like with that guy who came in 11th
• 1:21:02
  versus 10th, like how that could change whatever.
• 1:21:04
  I think something that I am like realizing is, is people in this
• 1:21:09
  field and like at this level, they're giving it everything.
• 1:21:13
  Like it's, it takes everything like think of all the training
• 1:21:16
  that you had to get that one spot over him, like all the
• 1:21:19
  commitments and he probably. Made.
• 1:21:21
  Almost as much, you know, sacrifice and then gets, you
• 1:21:24
  know, and so that's real. And so you know, you got to work
• 1:21:28
  hard. Could have been an execution
• 1:21:29
  thing if he had biked 3 watts less.
• 1:21:32
  He would have. He wouldn't have blown up in the
• 1:21:34
  last literally half mile of the race and would have finished
• 1:21:37
  strong if he had taken three more cups of water at the right
• 1:21:41
  time. Maybe he would have kept his
• 1:21:42
  core temperature at. I mean, it's some of those
• 1:21:44
  margins are razor thin. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's hard,
• 1:21:48
  but I would some other. I mean, if people want some like
• 1:21:50
  real, like reflection insight, we'll say the following things I
• 1:21:53
  did right and wrong. One thing that I did right was I
• 1:21:58
  never changed my coach had the same coach from start to end and
• 1:22:02
  that was really helpful. I think people are constantly
• 1:22:05
  you shouldn't stay with a bad coach.
• 1:22:06
  You shouldn't say stay with somebody who's not responsive.
• 1:22:08
  You shouldn't say with somebody that's not helping.
• 1:22:11
  But on the other hand, like jumping coaches constantly is, I
• 1:22:14
  think like a problem because sometimes you don't see the
• 1:22:17
  results until you spend some time, you know, you know, use it
• 1:22:21
  inside of a a particular matrix. The second thing is that I, my
• 1:22:25
  coach was also one of my best friends and I do not in any way
• 1:22:29
  regret that. I think a lot of people want the
• 1:22:31
  fancy coach with the fancy name. I had so much more fun and so
• 1:22:37
  much more joy and emotional support and such a better life.
• 1:22:44
  Life. I was going to say like
• 1:22:46
  experience. No, just life because I did this
• 1:22:50
  with somebody that I shared the journey with and who I genuinely
• 1:22:53
  enjoyed doing doing that with. Same with training partners.
• 1:22:57
  I picked training partners that were fun, not that were fast.
• 1:23:02
  I picked training partners that made the experience, the journey
• 1:23:05
  better and that was really critical and I really loved
• 1:23:07
  that. Things I did wrong, I did not
• 1:23:11
  invest in myself in terms of money and support like I was, I
• 1:23:18
  didn't get myself the fancy wheels because the sponsor, I
• 1:23:21
  didn't get a sponsor that gave me fancy wheels.
• 1:23:22
  So I was like, I'll make do with, you know, low quality
• 1:23:26
  stuff I didn't do, you know, I should have brought in some, you
• 1:23:29
  know, some more testing and stuff like that.
• 1:23:31
  And I didn't, you know, I didn't do that soon enough.
• 1:23:35
  I didn't get, you know, I brought in Ben Kessel to do the
• 1:23:38
  strength training stuff for me and I should have done that a
• 1:23:41
  decade sooner than I did. You know, I just didn't.
• 1:23:44
  I just didn't invest in myself and that that can be a, a, a big
• 1:23:47
  mistake. Yeah, I think those things also,
• 1:23:52
  I didn't pick the bucket late races soon enough.
• 1:23:55
  Like I wish I'd done, you know, maybe one or two less name brand
• 1:23:59
  Iron Man's and done Norseman when I was still closer to my
• 1:24:04
  peak. I think that would have been
• 1:24:05
  really cool. I never did Roth because I
• 1:24:09
  there's a famous trap on trap on challenge Roth.
• 1:24:12
  It's used to be an Iron Man. Then they became their own race,
• 1:24:14
  but they're it's an Iron Man distance.
• 1:24:16
  And I never did that race because it didn't I didn't think
• 1:24:18
  I'd have a good result. I didn't I don't need the good.
• 1:24:20
  I didn't need as many good results.
• 1:24:22
  I needed the experience. And that race everyone tells me
• 1:24:24
  is the best fan 100,000 spectators on course.
• 1:24:28
  I know right, or sometimes 200 and I I never did that race.
• 1:24:31
  Why? That was so silly of me.
• 1:24:32
  I was like, well, it's too competitive.
• 1:24:34
  My result would have been lost in the sauce and I would have,
• 1:24:36
  you know, nobody would have seen it.
• 1:24:38
  Should have had that race. Also, there's a famous duathlon
• 1:24:42
  called Zophagen in Switzerland and the the run is a trail run,
• 1:24:46
  actually. Yeah, it's a cycle.
• 1:24:47
  It's a five mile trail run and then a 20 mile trail run with a
• 1:24:53
  86 mile bike in between. Wow.
• 1:24:55
  Yeah, the bike is on road, but it's up and down mountain
• 1:24:58
  passes. It's psycho hard.
• 1:24:59
  And the trail run is also like brutal, brutal, brutal.
• 1:25:03
  Lots of vertical. You're in Switzerland.
• 1:25:05
  It's gorgeous. Never did it.
• 1:25:06
  I was like, well, I'm a good swimmer, doesn't really play to
• 1:25:08
  my strengths. Who cares?
• 1:25:09
  I should have done that race. Yeah.
• 1:25:11
  So do your bucket races sooner rather than later.
• 1:25:14
  You won't have as much time when you're as good as you are that
• 1:25:18
  you think you will have. And I had a long career.
• 1:25:21
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there, you know, see
• 1:25:24
  the summit. Do you know that race in New
• 1:25:25
  Hampshire? Yes.
• 1:25:27
  Yeah. Never did it.
• 1:25:28
  What? That race is awesome.
• 1:25:30
  You know, like, I would have loved to have done that race in
• 1:25:32
  my prime, you know? So yeah, do some of those bucket
• 1:25:36
  loose races sooner rather than later, is my advice to anybody
• 1:25:38
  out there. Yeah, no, that's cool.
• 1:25:40
  Did you ever have any big setbacks, big injuries in your
• 1:25:44
  in your long career? Pretty smooth.
• 1:25:45
  I'm really lucky. There you go.
• 1:25:47
  Nice. Yeah, Really.
• 1:25:48
  Really. Oh, sorry.
• 1:25:49
  Made my dog bark. Yeah, knock on wood, I didn't.
• 1:25:53
  I really had very little. I had AI when I was racing Rd.
• 1:25:56
  cycling. I crashed, broke my wrist.
• 1:25:59
  I was out really like 3 days. Oh wow.
• 1:26:02
  OK. I mean, I, I had to ride
• 1:26:04
  indoors. Yeah, yeah, You know, with a
• 1:26:06
  cast and then, you know, so I, I don't think I raced for six
• 1:26:09
  weeks, but I was back on the back to training within three
• 1:26:12
  days. Yeah.
• 1:26:15
  I had plantar fasciitis a few times.
• 1:26:17
  Have a little bit of a weird I broke my ankle doing OCR at one
• 1:26:22
  point, but it, well, it's, it healed really fast.
• 1:26:27
  Yeah. I'm just been really, really
• 1:26:29
  lucky with that stuff. I'm really durable.
• 1:26:31
  There's one of the things that I, I've heard is the way you
• 1:26:35
  find out who's an ultra endurance champion is you take
• 1:26:38
  12 eggs, throw them at the wall and the one that doesn't break
• 1:26:40
  is the champ. Like durability is really
• 1:26:43
  important. Like people, you know, you asked
• 1:26:45
  me about a VO2 Max. I don't think that's as
• 1:26:47
  important for endurance sports is for durability.
• 1:26:50
  You know, I have a I'm actually currently the third best athlete
• 1:26:55
  in my family, maybe fourth. Yeah.
• 1:26:57
  And but and my sister is by was is but far better athlete than
• 1:27:02
  me. But she was constantly injured
• 1:27:04
  and that was always this really difficult thing.
• 1:27:06
  And there's, you know, there's it's just a real problem.
• 1:27:09
  So you and you don't it's hard to test your ability.
• 1:27:12
  You don't know until you know, And with endurance sports, it's
• 1:27:16
  such a, you know, more is often more.
• 1:27:19
  So if you can do more miles, if you can do more intensity, if
• 1:27:22
  you can do more training, handle more training load without
• 1:27:24
  getting hurt or sick, right. That's a big, you know, that's,
• 1:27:30
  that's critical. I did have some big bouts of
• 1:27:32
  burnout during my career. But yeah, yeah, I mean that that
• 1:27:37
  that was my big setbacks is a couple of times I was just like,
• 1:27:40
  oh, I have to take two months off.
• 1:27:42
  I have to shut this down, start over.
• 1:27:44
  I am cooked. Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of
• 1:27:47
  ultra runners blurred on the edge of that and some, you know,
• 1:27:49
  I've seen definitely some people kind of hit that or they really
• 1:27:52
  need to take that time off. But it's always a fine line
• 1:27:55
  because I, yeah, I think if you can do more volume and you can
• 1:27:58
  absorb it, recover from it, you're just going to be, if
• 1:28:00
  you're a little bit faster, you've done a little bit more
• 1:28:03
  and you're in the same like, I think it's just better for you.
• 1:28:05
  Yeah. But you don't want to tell
• 1:28:06
  people that a lot of the time because they'll just go kill
• 1:28:09
  themselves and it's, you know, it's.
• 1:28:11
  The time, yeah. I mean, that's, you know, not
• 1:28:13
  everybody, not everybody's going to dedicate themselves to, you
• 1:28:16
  know, to 100 mile week. Yeah, it's a lot.
• 1:28:19
  It's a lot. Yeah, durability.
• 1:28:24
  Is that something that you obviously it seems like you've
• 1:28:27
  kind of just had that throughout, but I think yeah,
• 1:28:29
  endurance sports and running particular it it takes a while
• 1:28:33
  to build up that durability. Just the pounding.
• 1:28:34
  Obviously bike and swim is a little bit less, but did you
• 1:28:37
  find, and I think that's why athletes can have, you know,
• 1:28:41
  long distance endurance events. You see a lot of older athletes.
• 1:28:44
  And did you find that your prime was a lot later than you thought
• 1:28:48
  it would have been or could have been?
• 1:28:50
  Or like, where did you 'cause you raced into your 40s?
• 1:28:53
  Yeah, well, deep into your 40s, I.
• 1:28:54
  Mean that 3049 I raced Canada man as they have 1/2 distance
• 1:29:03
  and they have their own half World Championships and it's
• 1:29:06
  called the solo 'cause you have to do it solo obviously like no
• 1:29:09
  support and I was leading the race for quite some time and
• 1:29:13
  ended up 5th overall and qualified for the World
• 1:29:17
  Championships for the X try the extreme try half World
• 1:29:21
  Championships as like a open. You know, I don't, they don't
• 1:29:24
  really call it elite, but it's like.
• 1:29:26
  You know. Qualified spot as a, you know,
• 1:29:28
  in the in their open division. Just pretty badass at 49.
• 1:29:32
  Yeah, that is crazy. I would have done it at 50, but
• 1:29:34
  my daughter was born right before the race.
• 1:29:36
  I know. So I'm very happy.
• 1:29:38
  I no regrets. I very happy to be a dad, but
• 1:29:42
  there was no way I was going to make that race in Scotland.
• 1:29:45
  It's so good too. I'm like, it is sad that I
• 1:29:48
  couldn't do that race, but because it, it looks like 1, but
• 1:29:51
  it's called Kelp Man, and it just looks amazing.
• 1:29:54
  Yeah, someday, someday I will get back to Kelp Man.
• 1:29:56
  But anyway, so yeah, 49, I was still at the pointy end of of,
• 1:30:00
  you know, a pretty hard, pretty hard race.
• 1:30:03
  And, you know, but yeah, every single person who passed me, I
• 1:30:06
  could have fathered, Yeah, they were all young enough to have
• 1:30:11
  been my kid, like, by a lot like, yeah.
• 1:30:14
  So that was weird. No.
• 1:30:17
  So the answer is actually kind of weird.
• 1:30:19
  But the conventional wisdom when I was coming up was that you
• 1:30:23
  would peak late. That like your mid 30s to would
• 1:30:27
  be your best years, like 35 to 38 would be your best years.
• 1:30:30
  And a lot of the guys that were winning Kona at that time were
• 1:30:33
  kind of around that age. It was believed, wrongly, that
• 1:30:39
  you couldn't go that long and early in your career.
• 1:30:42
  So it was like they didn't expect you'd see anybody who's
• 1:30:46
  in their 20s winning Kona or any of the race like that 'cause
• 1:30:49
  they hadn't, you know, quote, UN quote, paid their dues.
• 1:30:51
  Yeah, but but that has been turned on its head now.
• 1:30:56
  You see. You see some of these guys just
• 1:30:58
  smashing Iron Man distance races in their 20s.
• 1:31:02
  So. So I wasn't surprised that I had
• 1:31:04
  good years between 35 and 38, because back then that was meant
• 1:31:08
  to be the good years. Yeah.
• 1:31:09
  Yeah. Yeah, no it makes sense.
• 1:31:11
  I ultra running, same thing. Like, yeah, there are some young
• 1:31:14
  kids going out there and just, like, crushing these wicked long
• 1:31:17
  races. And I think people are like, oh
• 1:31:18
  shit, Oh my, you got to watch it out.
• 1:31:21
  Yeah, I think the, I think the idea that you only get faster as
• 1:31:24
  you get old, you know? Yeah, I don't think that's I
• 1:31:27
  don't, I don't think that you a lifetime of endurance sports
• 1:31:31
  will will guarantee you a win against some of these people who
• 1:31:34
  are coming up with fearlessness and new training ideas and new
• 1:31:39
  science and and are just, I mean, they're, you know, really
• 1:31:43
  they're really, they're really doing great.
• 1:31:45
  Yeah. Well, I think the other thing
• 1:31:46
  too with these long distance events is they're getting so
• 1:31:49
  competitive. You got to go for it.
• 1:31:52
  What, like you just have to, and a lot of people like, well, DNF
• 1:31:55
  races are because they just went out so hard.
• 1:31:58
  Like you can't be conservative at these races even though
• 1:32:00
  they're long distance because everyone is swinging really
• 1:32:02
  hard. Yeah, and that's the as these
• 1:32:05
  sports got bigger, that's what happened.
• 1:32:06
  You saw that. We saw that in Iron Man 2 when,
• 1:32:09
  you know, when it used to be the race had 20 pros, you could kind
• 1:32:13
  of pace yourself, be conservative and race your own
• 1:32:16
  race. When you have 40 or 50 or, you
• 1:32:20
  know, at Kona now, I think there's, you know, there's, you
• 1:32:24
  know, 50 strong, strong guys. You got to go hard and you see
• 1:32:28
  big names blow up because they had to take those risks.
• 1:32:31
  You know, they can't. They can't, you know, they can't
• 1:32:34
  start letting the race get away from them because it won't come
• 1:32:37
  back anymore. Yeah.
• 1:32:39
  And that's, you know, when they were in the 80s when there were
• 1:32:41
  three guys, you can maybe roll that dice.
• 1:32:43
  But now when there's 30 guys going that fast, you know, the
• 1:32:46
  train's leaving. You better get on it.
• 1:32:48
  Yeah. And you are seeing that in.
• 1:32:50
  You are seeing that in ultra running, too.
• 1:32:52
  Yeah. You're seeing these, you know,
• 1:32:53
  and it, it pushes everybody. And yeah, you see more failures,
• 1:32:56
  but you also see people doing things that maybe they wouldn't
• 1:32:59
  have been able to do in terms of times if they didn't take those,
• 1:33:02
  if they didn't take some big risks.
• 1:33:04
  Yeah, I think there's been a lot of records that thought were,
• 1:33:06
  you know, untouchable that are just going down pretty.
• 1:33:09
  Yeah, by large margin. I think in the last Western
• 1:33:12
  states. Killian Jordan, who I'm sure
• 1:33:14
  that you know, he, he just said something like to the young guys
• 1:33:18
  who were going off fast. He's like, guys, we don't have
• 1:33:20
  to run this fast. What are you doing?
• 1:33:22
  And he's obviously been around for a while, so.
• 1:33:23
  I mean, the irony is he was that young guy.
• 1:33:25
  Yeah, Yeah. When he came up, everybody's
• 1:33:27
  like, who is this young kid, you know, with the all white from
• 1:33:31
  Europe and, you know, taking all these crazy risks early on.
• 1:33:35
  But now, yeah, now he's now he's the one being like, whoa, yeah,
• 1:33:39
  it's funny, but yeah. Now it's cool, but yeah, you can
• 1:33:42
  never count the older folks out though, because I I say
• 1:33:45
  sometimes you show up to a race and yeah, some guy with a 20
• 1:33:48
  year old pack who's just eating like a Snickers bar, he's going
• 1:33:52
  to kick your ass. There are there are those like
• 1:33:54
  anomalies? I I remember twice this happened
• 1:33:57
  to me. I showed up at a local race in
• 1:33:59
  Cape Cod and there was like several pros there just like a
• 1:34:02
  happenstance. It wasn't a pro race, but me and
• 1:34:05
  two of my friends who are also pro just happened to end up at
• 1:34:08
  this local race. And we all lost to a guy in like
• 1:34:11
  rec specs and like on like a a bike that was like 15 years
• 1:34:16
  older than us, ours. And he just crushed us.
• 1:34:19
  And we were all, and apparently he's like some, he was older,
• 1:34:21
  but he was like some local legend who like loves that race
• 1:34:25
  and is a monster. Yeah.
• 1:34:27
  And yeah, that happens. I love that.
• 1:34:29
  I like actually now I'm 50. Sometimes I am that guy.
• 1:34:32
  Yeah, it sounds like. Yeah, it sounds like you were at
• 1:34:34
  least at the Snow Devil. Well, then I took second but
• 1:34:36
  like, but like, yeah, I won a triathlon this year and I was is
• 1:34:40
  the the guy, the guy with the the Gray hair who would know
• 1:34:43
  probably, you know, got looked over and the.
• 1:34:46
  Race. No shame in here.
• 1:34:47
  No shame. I would look up.
• 1:34:48
  I mean, I want to be there one day.
• 1:34:51
  It was good. Like it just so happened that
• 1:34:53
  race really suited me because it had a very long swim,
• 1:34:55
  proportionally, and I'm a pretty good swimmer.
• 1:34:57
  So I came out of the water with like enough of a lead that
• 1:35:00
  nobody, you know, nobody, nobody caught me, even though I was
• 1:35:04
  probably 20 years older than the rest of the podium.
• 1:35:07
  Yeah, that is so funny. That's awesome.
• 1:35:11
  A little bit, a little. I had a couple questions like
• 1:35:13
  coaching. So I have a quote.
• 1:35:16
  This is actually this is probably like 10 year.
• 1:35:17
  I don't even know if I should if I should say this.
• 1:35:19
  You were fine. I was listening to some old
• 1:35:22
  Jenner stuff. Whoa, the Zen Try podcast.
• 1:35:25
  Shout out to Brett. Yeah.
• 1:35:27
  Yeah, right. By the way, who's back?
• 1:35:29
  The Zen try Zeny the art of triathlon is back for all of you
• 1:35:32
  who are looking for a podcast, great podcast.
• 1:35:34
  I love Brett. We're we're like we're like
• 1:35:36
  tight now. We became friends and yeah, I
• 1:35:38
  would I would stay, stay with him in Texas, Texas when I was
• 1:35:43
  at the height of my pro days because it was warm down there.
• 1:35:45
  So I do my January camp and he came to my Spain camp in
• 1:35:49
  February once. Yeah.
• 1:35:50
  Love that guy. Anyways.
• 1:35:51
  No, that's awesome. Yeah.
• 1:35:51
  No, I was listening to that and it was good.
• 1:35:53
  And I noticed that they had a few this year.
• 1:35:55
  Yes. So he's been doing it for a long
• 1:35:57
  time. He.
• 1:35:57
  Did he did one with me with Norseman?
• 1:35:59
  By the way, for those of you who want to deep dive into Norseman,
• 1:36:01
  yes, he has a he had he, he interviewed me right after that.
• 1:36:04
  Yep, no SO. OK.
• 1:36:06
  So OK, so hit me with some. Terrible quote.
• 1:36:08
  No no, this is. This is funny too, because those
• 1:36:10
  those podcasts were hilarious. I was like, this guy's
• 1:36:13
  hilarious, extremely funny. So I was like, and he's going to
• 1:36:16
  be a good. He's a person to interview.
• 1:36:18
  But you said most people can make training plans themselves
• 1:36:21
  with a couple books and an Internet connection.
• 1:36:23
  So this is a quote from this is 12 years ago.
• 1:36:26
  So I think it's, it's obviously you're half joking, but I think
• 1:36:30
  there is some truth to it in that like there if you just go
• 1:36:35
  on like the AI stuff. Google a good.
• 1:36:37
  Training plan for race and you're going to get like what
• 1:36:39
  you need generally, but what do you think is most important that
• 1:36:43
  a coach does? Because there's all these
• 1:36:45
  factors outside of just a training plan in a workout that
• 1:36:48
  make coaches get the best out of their athletes.
• 1:36:51
  How do you do that and you're coaching and I guess how is your
• 1:36:54
  coach done that for you, do you think?
• 1:36:56
  OK, so let me give you the three things that I think are are
• 1:37:00
  they're my 3 responses and they're all individual points,
• 1:37:03
  but they're all helpful. The first thing is I actually
• 1:37:06
  stand by that quote. I think you will get 70% of the
• 1:37:10
  way there on your on your own. The here's where, here's where
• 1:37:13
  coaches are critical 1. You will inherently train the
• 1:37:19
  things you like most, that you are best at, where you will see
• 1:37:23
  the least amount of gains. So if you're a super strong
• 1:37:26
  cyclist, you will go out and do a lot of bike training and you
• 1:37:29
  will make very small amounts of progress for a triathlon,
• 1:37:33
  whereas you really need somebody to tell you no, you need to, you
• 1:37:36
  need to swim more, you need to run more, whatever.
• 1:37:39
  So that's the first thing is that you need some sort of like
• 1:37:42
  you need some, some you need some sort of you need that part
• 1:37:46
  of it, the second part of it, maybe there's more parts of it,
• 1:37:48
  but the second part of that, which is actually part and part
• 1:37:50
  of what I was saying was really just you need an objective
• 1:37:53
  voice. You will, we, we joked about
• 1:37:55
  this earlier, but like a lot of times athletes will like, who
• 1:37:59
  are, will say be like, oh, this isn't working.
• 1:38:01
  I should double my efforts and really like they're actually,
• 1:38:04
  they're they're not recovering enough.
• 1:38:06
  So they're just making the problem twice as bad because
• 1:38:08
  athletes are emotional. They're not they're they're very
• 1:38:11
  subjective about their own training and racing.
• 1:38:13
  They don't have that objectiveness that a coach
• 1:38:15
  provides. It's really good, even if you
• 1:38:18
  know more than your coach to, you know, to just have an
• 1:38:22
  objective person say to you, this is what you're doing right
• 1:38:27
  and this is what you're doing wrong.
• 1:38:28
  Who's who's detached from you and isn't in the exhaustion and
• 1:38:33
  the fog of all the emotions that being an athlete is.
• 1:38:36
  So those things are really important.
• 1:38:38
  Athletes are just simply too emotional to be objectively good
• 1:38:41
  at their as their own coaches for the most part.
• 1:38:45
  I think that's the other thing is that they're A1 size fits
• 1:38:51
  nobody training plan will not be tailored to what you need.
• 1:38:54
  So if you go at, you know, a standard triathlon program might
• 1:38:58
  have three bikes, three runs and three swims per week.
• 1:39:02
  If you're a collegian swimmer, you don't need 3 swims, you need
• 1:39:06
  2, maybe one and a strength training program.
• 1:39:10
  And you should be skewing that pie, the pie chart of your
• 1:39:13
  training to something totally, totally unrelated.
• 1:39:16
  And you won't know that they and that won't you know these
• 1:39:18
  one-size-fits-all programs won't work and running, for example,
• 1:39:21
  right. If you you know, if you do A1
• 1:39:24
  size fits all program, it may be, you know, it may not take
• 1:39:29
  into account the fact that you're very durable and you
• 1:39:31
  could do a lot more volume. It may not take into account
• 1:39:33
  that you're not durable and you should be doing a lot more cross
• 1:39:36
  training. You know, it may or may not have
• 1:39:38
  the appropriate amount of training.
• 1:39:39
  You know, you might have enough time to add strength training,
• 1:39:42
  you might not have time for strength training and
• 1:39:44
  subsequently you have to come up with creative ways to build it
• 1:39:47
  into the workouts. None of that's going to be none
• 1:39:51
  of that's going to be in A1 size fits all training plan.
• 1:39:54
  And so the customization is really key.
• 1:39:57
  And then the third thing this is where I get a lot of my a lot of
• 1:40:02
  my a lot of my business from is that they don't have the time to
• 1:40:07
  read some books on training and to and to use their Internet to
• 1:40:12
  research all this stuff. They want somebody who just
• 1:40:14
  knows this like I can. I could probably.
• 1:40:19
  Figure out how to do my own oil change.
• 1:40:22
  Like I could probably find some YouTube videos, go to the shop,
• 1:40:26
  figure all the parts I need, learn how to do it, make a few
• 1:40:28
  mistakes. I don't have time for that.
• 1:40:31
  I just have to, I pull into Jiffy Lube.
• 1:40:33
  They change my oil because like I just have like a busy life.
• 1:40:36
  A lot of my athletes are highly driven people who just, you
• 1:40:40
  know, they don't want to be spending all their time
• 1:40:42
  researching and creating training plans for themselves.
• 1:40:45
  They want to wake up and do the training plan that somebody else
• 1:40:49
  who's more, who is more knowledgeable, who's done the
• 1:40:51
  work to not just to know how to do this, how to make these
• 1:40:56
  training plans. They want that.
• 1:40:59
  They just want somebody to do for them what they don't have
• 1:41:02
  the time to do them for themselves, which is to, you
• 1:41:05
  know, be really well educated on all this stuff, on all the
• 1:41:08
  sports, science, the nutrition. They just want to have a
• 1:41:10
  resource they can just go to and that's worth paying for for
• 1:41:14
  them. And I think that's fair.
• 1:41:16
  I do that all the time. I don't do my own dentistry.
• 1:41:19
  Yeah, Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 1:41:22
  Like, you know, I could probably go to dentist school and become
• 1:41:24
  a dentist. Like I don't have time for that,
• 1:41:25
  so I go to a dentist. Shout out to my dentist at
• 1:41:28
  Gallery 57 who's 70 years old and about to do The Iron Man.
• 1:41:32
  Oh wow. Yeah, by the way, yeah, Gallery
• 1:41:35
  57 in New York. Yeah, shout out to Andy for the
• 1:41:39
  Yeah, at 70 years old, he's done the Iron Man before, OK?
• 1:41:42
  He's coming out of not quite retirement, but coming coming
• 1:41:45
  back at 70 to do to to take another crack at the Iron Man.
• 1:41:49
  That's awesome. Yeah, he's.
• 1:41:50
  Coming to my Spain camp, too. I cannot wait.
• 1:41:52
  Sweet. Yeah.
• 1:41:53
  But anyways, let's go in. He's also, by the way, a badass
• 1:41:55
  dentist. I don't have the.
• 1:41:56
  He doesn't have the time to become a triathlon coach.
• 1:41:58
  I don't have the time to become a dentist.
• 1:42:00
  For it works out perfect. And right, so he does dental
• 1:42:02
  work, I do coaching. And that yeah, it just saves
• 1:42:05
  everybody a lot of a lot of hassle.
• 1:42:08
  And then the last part is, and I think this is really critical is
• 1:42:12
  I love coaching. I love hanging out with my
• 1:42:14
  athletes. I love talking to them.
• 1:42:15
  I love hearing about the results.
• 1:42:17
  A lot of times you just want somebody on the journey with
• 1:42:19
  you. And that's that's real.
• 1:42:22
  Like you want it, You want that somebody, you know, 1 is like
• 1:42:26
  for something like an ultra, right, which is overwhelming.
• 1:42:29
  You want the confidence of somebody who's been there and
• 1:42:32
  done that and saying no, these are the milestones you have to
• 1:42:34
  hit to be on the right pace and to have confidence.
• 1:42:37
  Like I had a 99% finish rate at Iron Man because my, I was so
• 1:42:43
  confident in my, my, my athletes, my training plans are
• 1:42:47
  very hard. So if an athlete finishes them,
• 1:42:49
  they have an incredibly high confidence rate that they are
• 1:42:51
  going to finish the Iron Man. It it literally we are, barring
• 1:42:55
  a few like really unfortunate mishaps, all my athletes finish
• 1:42:58
  their Iron Man's, whether it's their first or second or fifth,
• 1:43:01
  because my training plans are hard and they can, but they
• 1:43:05
  don't have that confidence because they've never
• 1:43:07
  necessarily done an Iron Man for, let's say.
• 1:43:09
  So having that confidence, having that ability to, to
• 1:43:14
  having that like kind of person with you to say, no, you're on
• 1:43:16
  the right path is for something that's really daunting, like a
• 1:43:19
  marathon. Like, you know, that's really
• 1:43:21
  valuable. I think that I think that's
• 1:43:23
  really important. And you don't get that from an
• 1:43:25
  Internet connection and a book. You know, you, you, you only get
• 1:43:28
  that from somebody who's willing to do some emotional work,
• 1:43:31
  emotional labor, which is totally appropriate as a coach.
• 1:43:34
  You should be expecting to do emotional labor as a coach.
• 1:43:36
  Yeah. So, you know, to say no, no,
• 1:43:38
  you're doing great. We got this.
• 1:43:40
  This is the workout you needed to do.
• 1:43:41
  You crushed it. This workout went bad.
• 1:43:43
  But don't worry, you know, or like, oh by the way, you are
• 1:43:46
  worry. You should you're.
• 1:43:49
  Not training enough like you're totally, you know, you committed
• 1:43:51
  to this big thing and you're not getting it done like worry.
• 1:43:54
  This is the time to worry. You know that too, right?
• 1:43:57
  That's also important as a coach.
• 1:43:59
  But no, I think, I think that's what coaches bring to the beyond
• 1:44:02
  the nuts and bolts of a, you know, one-size-fits-all or one
• 1:44:07
  size fits nobody training plan so you can download off of, you
• 1:44:10
  know. Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome.
• 1:44:12
  That's great insight. All right, we'll end it on some
• 1:44:15
  of the nuts and bolts of coaching.
• 1:44:16
  Give us one of your favorite out running workouts.
• 1:44:18
  It could be on a hill, could be on a, but it could be flat.
• 1:44:21
  Give us because I I yet another thing that you said, you really
• 1:44:24
  like making workouts. So leave us with a really good
• 1:44:26
  running workout, one of your favorites. 16 * 200 at threshold
• 1:44:34
  recovery on the downhill, 10 minute warm up, 5 minutes of
• 1:44:37
  drill, 30 minutes 30 seconds drill, 30 seconds running.
• 1:44:41
  Thinking about the drill because I like to incorporate the drill
• 1:44:45
  movement into actual running, but wall being really mindful of
• 1:44:49
  it. So you do the drill for 30
• 1:44:50
  seconds, let's say skipping or, or bounding or high knees or
• 1:44:55
  whatever, whatever the drill is that you pick right kick backs,
• 1:44:58
  AK butt kicks, you know, lateral crossover, whatever drill you
• 1:45:01
  want 30 seconds of the drill, then 30 seconds of running.
• 1:45:05
  So that's a 10 minute warm up, 5 minutes of drills, maybe a
• 1:45:09
  couple of minutes of light recovery to let your heart rate
• 1:45:11
  come down and then 16 * 200 on a steep climb to getting out.
• 1:45:16
  You won't, you won't hit it the first couple of times, but but
• 1:45:19
  you want to aim for lactate threshold and then yeah, and
• 1:45:23
  then recovery on the downhill then you know, 5-10 minutes cool
• 1:45:25
  down sweet from zone 2 down to zone 1.
• 1:45:27
  Awesome. Yeah, that's my yeah, And I'm
• 1:45:30
  just gonna tell you why I love that workout.
• 1:45:32
  Yeah, speed hill, like speed work is important, but doing it
• 1:45:35
  on a hill cuts down on so much of the pounding that it's a
• 1:45:38
  great way to do. Everyone can do this workout
• 1:45:40
  without having to worry, without necessarily having to worry
• 1:45:43
  about getting hurt. Yeah, the same way you might
• 1:45:45
  have that have trouble if you were doing it on the road or a
• 1:45:47
  track. Yeah, I love uphill, uphill
• 1:45:48
  workouts, I think, yeah, lower impact if you're a little bit.
• 1:45:51
  Oh, and build up to the 16. By the way, you can start with
• 1:45:53
  like as low as 5, yeah. Yeah, sweet, awesome.
• 1:45:57
  Well, I guess is there anything else?
• 1:45:59
  Anything big things that I meant?
• 1:46:00
  I don't know, man. I feel like we covered all of
• 1:46:01
  them. Yeah, this is my life story.
• 1:46:03
  I appreciate. Give me the chance to tell.
• 1:46:04
  It Yeah, no, this is awesome. I really appreciate you coming
• 1:46:07
  on. I'm excited for the run.
• 1:46:08
  Where can people find the coaching?
• 1:46:10
  Maybe a little. I know you talked about the
• 1:46:12
  strong like Bull, Spain camp, anything.
• 1:46:15
  You got a shout out. Yeah, so let me my Instagram is
• 1:46:18
  at the deer runner and the brand new URL for my coaching is
• 1:46:27
  strong like bull training.com and then just click the back
• 1:46:31
  slash coaching. So that will that has all of the
• 1:46:35
  coaching information you need. The there is actually a new
• 1:46:38
  strong light bull training website that's coming, that's
• 1:46:41
  coming, coming live, but that'll you'll find your way there.
• 1:46:44
  And you'll definitely find me there either on the on the gram,
• 1:46:47
  as I could say, or, or or at that website,
• 1:46:53
  stronglightbulltraining.com back slash coaching.
• 1:46:56
  Also, you can find me strongly Bull has a Facebook page and I'm
• 1:47:01
  also on Facebook. Sweet.
• 1:47:04
  All right. Well, cool.
• 1:47:05
  Really. Appreciate it, John.
• 1:47:06
  Pay stack. Yeah, let's do.
• 1:47:07
  It it feels really warm in here and it, it looks so it looks so
• 1:47:11
  sunny right out there and it's not, it's not.
• 1:47:14
  Yeah, no, it should be fun. All right, let's do it.
• 1:47:16
  Let's do it. Thanks guys.
• 1:47:21
  OK. And wrapping this up, we're
• 1:47:23
  going the we're OK, wrapping this up, we're going through the
• 1:47:28
  Tartic frozen Yeti results. So we're going to go through
• 1:47:32
  this. It was a cold day.
• 1:47:33
  It was the same weekend as last year standing super cold.
• 1:47:37
  And so for the 30 hour, no one hit 100 miles.
• 1:47:40
  So no one got a buckle this year, which I think just you got
• 1:47:43
  to attribute it to the cold. There was a picture of Chris
• 1:47:46
  Mann wearing with literally ice on his head and his face.
• 1:47:49
  It was epic, but OK. The 30 hour results, the men's
• 1:47:54
  top 3, Jeffrey Howe, 75 miles, Jason Kaplan, 75 miles.
• 1:48:00
  They both went 75 miles, but I think Jeffrey finished that lap
• 1:48:04
  first, so he came in first, Jason in second and then Chris
• 1:48:07
  Manwaring in 3rd, 65 miles. That was the podium.
• 1:48:12
  The 30 hour of results for the woman Denise Klatt, 70 miles,
• 1:48:16
  she came in first, so she was third overall.
• 1:48:20
  Came in first for the woman. Gummy, Oh gosh, Gummy Mabata, 50
• 1:48:28
  miles, she came in second and then Chloe Jordan, 40 miles, she
• 1:48:32
  came in third. The 50 mile results for the
• 1:48:35
  men's Chris Oreo, 3 hours and 3rd and 12 minutes, he came in
• 1:48:41
  first. Ryan Mansell, 3 hours and 20
• 1:48:43
  minutes. Thomas Solomon, 3 hours and 31
• 1:48:46
  minutes. There's a podium there.
• 1:48:48
  And then the 50 miles women, Jillian Rocco, 4 hours 10
• 1:48:52
  minutes. I ran to her on Tecumseh.
• 1:48:54
  Shout out what's up. Nice job.
• 1:48:56
  First place, second Andrea Meza, Phelps, 443 and then Moore Gray,
• 1:49:03
  3rd place, five hours, 58 minutes for the 50 mile boom.
• 1:49:07
  There you have it. Those are the results.
• 1:49:09
  Like I said, it was super cold, but they they were.
• 1:49:13
  Out there and they kept going. And then finally the Burke's
• 1:49:17
  Frozen Folly results. So I mentioned this in the
• 1:49:21
  previous podcast. It was a month long virtual sign
• 1:49:26
  up race that you could sign up for.
• 1:49:28
  So you just had to run this in January and there were four
• 1:49:32
  different races. There was the marathon who the
• 1:49:36
  winner ended up being John Milburn, 64 years old, shout out
• 1:49:40
  crushing it 4 hours. And then the female marathon
• 1:49:44
  winner, Lydia Meyer Turkson, 59 years old, four hours and 53
• 1:49:49
  minutes. So they won for the marathon and
• 1:49:53
  I'll just go the 50K results men winner John Milburn, 64 years
• 1:49:58
  old, again, same guy, 4 hours and 31 minutes.
• 1:50:02
  So this race you can run all the different distances.
• 1:50:06
  I I think these are different runs that he went on because
• 1:50:10
  John Milburn sweeps the marathon 50K and the two by 50K all on a
• 1:50:15
  treadmill. He he gets three first place
• 1:50:17
  finishes. So I look on ultra sign up and
• 1:50:21
  he gets three 100% rank first place finishes on ultra sign up.
• 1:50:26
  So this race is like kind of an ultra sign up pack.
• 1:50:29
  If you can go there and sweep on three or four of these races,
• 1:50:33
  you're just going to boost your ultra sign up numbers.
• 1:50:37
  And I don't know if I mentioned it, the marathon, the 50K and
• 1:50:41
  then the two by 50K is all on a treadmill and then they have an
• 1:50:45
  outdoor 50K. So the 50K like I said, John
• 1:50:48
  Milburn for 4 Hey, I got to call you back in a second.
• 1:50:56
  Are you what's wrong? Hit my car and I can't get into
• 1:51:01
  my car. Where are.
• 1:51:02
  You I left work earlier. Like they just left the note on
• 1:51:12
  my car. Oh, all right.
• 1:51:12
  I'm going to. No, no, no, I can come.
• 1:51:14
  I'm going to be there in 20 minutes, 15 minutes.
• 1:51:17
  OK. I just.
• 1:51:20
  Yeah, yeah, I'll be there. I'll be there.
• 1:51:25
  But I'm outside. I got to.
• 1:51:26
  I'll call you in a few minutes. You don't have to walk.
• 1:51:28
  Go into work and I'll be there in 20 minutes.
• 1:51:29
  OK. OK.
• 1:51:31
  Love you. Love you.
• 1:51:32
  Bye. OK.
• 1:51:40
  OK. So like I said, the 50K.
• 1:51:43
  John Milburn, 64 years old, four hours, 31 minutes.
• 1:51:46
  He wins again female winner Caitlin Rossi she goes 5 hours
• 1:51:50
  58 minutes and then the two by 50K.
• 1:51:53
  John Milburn 9 hours and 5 minutes, 3 races out 100% people
• 1:51:59
  and then the female winner for the 2 by 50K again.
• 1:52:03
  Lydia Meyer Turkson 13 hours and 8 minutes.
• 1:52:07
  So Lydia grabs the marathon and the two by 50K win and then John
• 1:52:14
  gets all three and then the outdoors 50K frozen Folly.
• 1:52:18
  We have a different men's winner, Scott Johnson, Yazufuk,
• 1:52:23
  5 hours and 19 minutes. And then the female winner,
• 1:52:25
  winner Emma McClain, 6 hours and 38 minutes.
• 1:52:29
  So John did not want to go outside.
• 1:52:31
  He's got has like indoor warrior, treadmill warrior.
• 1:52:34
  I'm going to sweep on the inside stuff, but I ain't going
• 1:52:38
  outside. I'm too.
• 1:52:39
  It's too cold for this thing. So those are all the race
• 1:52:44
  results. Yeah, so I don't.
• 1:52:47
  There you go. There you have it.
• 1:52:49
  Boom. All right, we're wrapping this
• 1:52:53
  episode up with a Mount Monadnock trail report, and
• 1:52:59
  we're going to do the Mount Monadnock Heartbreaker race
• 1:53:02
  recap because I was kind of out there.
• 1:53:06
  So the trip report, the trail report, we went out with Connor
• 1:53:10
  Brown loud Cortes. We did white arrow up, white dot
• 1:53:14
  down and then white dot back up, white arrow down.
• 1:53:19
  And the trails were like beautiful up top.
• 1:53:22
  It was a little bit icy and honestly all three of us kind of
• 1:53:26
  like weren't we don't know the trails super, super well.
• 1:53:29
  So kind of getting off trail a little ice patches here there.
• 1:53:32
  But once you got down off of the summit, it was like awesome
• 1:53:35
  trails a little bit loose, but it was almost like good for like
• 1:53:40
  slide like descending was awesome today getting close to
• 1:53:44
  that packed out highway. I just have my studded trail
• 1:53:48
  runners the whole time. So I never threw on spikes.
• 1:53:51
  I think both of them had spikes on, but they were really good
• 1:53:54
  conditions. So a little bit of freeze fog
• 1:53:57
  going on the next couple days if we don't get snow.
• 1:54:00
  Monadnock is looking really good on those two trails, but the
• 1:54:05
  Mount Monanok Heartbreaker race, the first, I think this is the
• 1:54:08
  first edition Valentine's Day heartbreaker race.
• 1:54:12
  It's an up dot. It's an up and down on white
• 1:54:15
  dot, which is like awesome. White dot is so iconic,
• 1:54:18
  legendary. And it was a smaller race, so I
• 1:54:21
  think there was a fifty person cap.
• 1:54:23
  I believe it was sold out. So there were people on the wait
• 1:54:25
  list that I don't think got in, but it was exciting race.
• 1:54:29
  The race started at 9:00 and we got to the base of White dot at
• 1:54:34
  8:50 and Connor had to go. Connor actually picked up in
• 1:54:39
  Ultra Running magazine that he was in.
• 1:54:43
  So Eli Barakian did a write up on the escutney backyard,
• 1:54:46
  vertical backyard and so he, Connor Brown is like the man in
• 1:54:50
  the Ultra Running mag, which is super cool.
• 1:54:53
  So they had Sarita had a hard copy for him.
• 1:54:56
  So we picked it up and and then we were just there right before
• 1:55:00
  the race started. So we got to see all the guys go
• 1:55:04
  off. Didn't do like a full we'll just
• 1:55:07
  go through the results after. But basically they they all went
• 1:55:10
  off. We hung around for a handful of
• 1:55:12
  minutes and then we started up. So we're in there like there
• 1:55:15
  were photographers set up and they were kind of taking
• 1:55:17
  pictures of us like we were, we were like, we're not in the
• 1:55:19
  race. I guess free pictures.
• 1:55:21
  I don't know if I go to the heartbreaker website or
• 1:55:24
  whatever, I'll get I'll get some free photos.
• 1:55:26
  But we were kind of in the race. You know, we we started up maybe
• 1:55:30
  like nine O 5. So we're going up and we passed
• 1:55:34
  some people going up. Everyone there was there was
• 1:55:37
  some messages in the snow, like, you know, go faster, good job,
• 1:55:41
  all that stuff. And then there was one maybe
• 1:55:43
  like a third of the way up Mount Monetanoch that said almost
• 1:55:47
  there. That was the meanest thing you
• 1:55:50
  could have wrote written there. I mean, I would assume most
• 1:55:53
  people in the race have been up white dot, but if you hadn't
• 1:55:58
  been up white dot and you're like, oh, we're almost there.
• 1:56:00
  They weren't even close. It was like, barely.
• 1:56:03
  At the steep. Part so I we thought that was
• 1:56:05
  funny. So we're going up and then we
• 1:56:08
  got to see a handful of people start, you know, bombing down.
• 1:56:12
  So when we were halfway up white dot it was Travis and Walter
• 1:56:17
  Mahonan. They were neck and neck like
• 1:56:19
  Walter I think was maybe 5 seconds behind Travis bombing on
• 1:56:25
  the way down. And then Steve Bertram, who is a
• 1:56:30
  listener shout out. And we all like we haven't met
• 1:56:35
  our whole group. We haven't met him, but we kind
• 1:56:37
  of like deduced that it was him in 3rd.
• 1:56:40
  And then Peter Benito was in fourth coming down.
• 1:56:42
  And then so and so how the men's race turned out.
• 1:56:46
  It looks like the up down Strava crown for for White dot.
• 1:56:52
  It was a tie between Walter and Travis, 3815 and 3815.
• 1:56:57
  Like they both got it today. I think Travis etched him out by
• 1:57:01
  a couple seconds potentially. That is, this is not the
• 1:57:03
  official results. We'll have to go back to the
• 1:57:05
  replay. But yeah, they go 1/2, which is
• 1:57:09
  like no shock. Those guys are just insane
• 1:57:12
  athletes, mountain runners. And then Steve Bertram comes in
• 1:57:16
  3rd. He goes like 42, a little bit
• 1:57:19
  over 42. So ripping.
• 1:57:22
  And yeah, Connor was kind of saying, yeah, he's I think Steve
• 1:57:26
  is in high school. Like he's a young guy just
• 1:57:28
  putting up. I look at Shrava putting up
• 1:57:30
  crazy numbers on Shrava ripping up and down white dot.
• 1:57:34
  So shout out to those guys. They they went just had crazy
• 1:57:39
  rips up and down. And then I think Peter Benigno
• 1:57:42
  came in fourth and that was all the people that I could see on
• 1:57:45
  the on the segment. And then for the women's, Ashley
• 1:57:49
  Bertram comes in first and then, Oh no, I'm messing it up.
• 1:57:56
  We may have to, I'll cut this. And then Monica Ares comes in
• 1:58:00
  second. They were the 2 on the Strava
• 1:58:04
  segment. I think Monica was about a
• 1:58:06
  little over 54 and then Ashley was a little over 53.
• 1:58:10
  But yeah, awesome racing. Yeah.
• 1:58:13
  Ashley, Bertram, the, I mean, the Bertrams, the Mahonans,
• 1:58:17
  these are just classic Monadnock crushers that just, we saw Lyle
• 1:58:23
  out there too. He was, he was in the race.
• 1:58:25
  So yeah, lots of lots of Monadnock crushers out there.
• 1:58:30
  And it was cool to see a race like that.
• 1:58:33
  I don't know how they got that permanent.
• 1:58:34
  Well, I guess with the State Park it's probably easier
• 1:58:38
  because they're all already kind of, I guess pro capitalism, you
• 1:58:45
  know, you always got to pay to go to Mononoke usually.
• 1:58:47
  But yeah, no, it was, it was cool to see that race kind of
• 1:58:51
  just pop up a good local race and I.
• 1:58:53
  I. I think I kind of ran it, you
• 1:58:56
  know, we were in the mix, we were unofficial in the mix, but
• 1:58:59
  you know, I think we kind of ran it.
• 1:59:00
  So that was a race recap. That was the trip report.
• 1:59:03
  That's how we're going to end the episode and hopefully enjoy
• 1:59:07
  it. If you stuck with us this far a
• 1:59:08
  little 2 hour banger, you stuck with the for the for the full 2
• 1:59:12
  hours. Shout out and yeah, we'll see
• 1:59:16
  you next time. Peace.
• 1:59:21
  OK. Do you want to, do you want to
• 1:59:24
  just talk into your mic real quick?
• 1:59:27
  Microphone check 1-2 What is this the punks getting tough
• 1:59:30
  with the roughneck business S upon styles upon styles What I
• 1:59:33
  have you tried to do the snow marathon but you only finished
• 1:59:37
  half. That may be your new intro song
• 1:59:44
  right there.