The Brain’s Role in Ultrarunning Performance with Scott Frey, PhD (2024) #240

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Trail and ultra runners.
What is going on?
Welcome to another episode ofthe coop cast.
As always, I am your host,coach jason coop, and this
episode of the podcast is are-release of one of my all-time
favorite conversations.
It is about the brain's role inultra running.
Welcome back to the podcasttoday, dr Scott Fry, who is an

(00:30):
internationally renownedneuroscientist.
He's a psychologist,accomplished endurance athlete,
he's an author and a teacher.
He was also literally at theforefront of functional MRI
technology and has shaped how weview the brain's role under
stress and during performance.
Also today you'll hear from CTScoaches Neil Pallas, who's a

(00:50):
mental performance coach andlicensed therapist, as well as
dialogue from coaches AddisonSmith and Adam Ferdinandson, who
provide their coach input onwhat's on some of the aspects
that Dr Fry and I talk aboutthroughout the course of this
podcast.
All right, folks, with that asa backdrop, I am getting right
out of the way.

(01:15):
Here's my conversation with DrScott Fry all about the brain's
role in ultra running.
Well, Scott, thanks for comingback on the podcast.
I think we'd be remiss if wedidn't initially have some
discussion about why you'resitting in front of me today and
why people's ear holes arebeing filled with your voice.
It's based on a previouspodcast that I did that you just

(01:36):
happened to be listening to and, first off, I'm appreciated of
really smart people like youthat actually listen to the
podcast and also listen to thepodcast and then give me
feedback about it.
So why don't you take thelisteners through that?
First and foremost, what's theorigin story of us getting on
the horn together today todiscuss this topic?

Speaker 3 (01:54):
Okay, okay, jason.
So picture this I'm in my car,I've got my skis all waxed, I'm
driving over the border fromnorthern Colorado to Wyoming Big
training day, upcoming for somecross-country ski races.
Headed to my favorite cafe tofuel up before I head up the top
of the pass and I'm listeningto the new CoopCast and you have

(02:18):
Dr Nick Berger on super smartguy and you guys are talking
about durability and I'm likethis is perfect, because I'm
about to go do this likemulti-hour high altitude skate
skiing workout.
I need to hear about durabilitybefore I take this beast on,
right?
So I'm loving the conversation,I'm just learning a ton and

(02:40):
really great stuff, but I keepgetting this little like nagging
thing that something's missing.
And, of course, for me, right,all the world's a nail when you
have a hammer.
I'm a brain science guy and soI'm thinking, come on, you've
got to say something about thebrain, about the central
mechanisms, role in fatigue,right?

(03:01):
Because fatigue and durabilityare like two sides of the same
coin, I think.
And so I get to the cafe, Iorder my great big bowl of
coffee and carbs and I'm sort ofsitting down.
I'm like I got to write Jasonand say, hey, man, I love that
conversation, but there was,like this 800 pound gorilla in
the room and, to your credit,you did say you know we should

(03:23):
probably talk about thepsychobiological model a little
bit here, but it didn't actuallycome to pass.
So this is the origin of today.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
So, to summarize it, it's you calling me out on a big
glaring flaw.
That was in the last podcast,which I'm, once again, I'm
totally appreciative of, just asyou mentioned.
You know, when you know youhave a particular hammer,
everything else is a nail.
I think a lot of coaches canactually empathize with this and
a lot of people in sportsscience can actually empathize

(03:53):
with this as well.
There is a very big biologicalbias for a lot of what we do
from a performance perspectiveand that history goes back a
long time, way before I startedcoaching and way before I was a
very mediocre athlete, and thatlegacy has persisted because of

(04:13):
that initial orientation of aswe look at the body primarily as
this vehicle that can do workand that work is limited by the
physical constraints of the sizeof our muscles and the size of
our heart and how much blood wecan pump through it and things
like that.
And we're beginning to well,before I get into that, a lot of
my initial training as a coachabsolutely had that biological

(04:36):
bias behind it.
You know we had access to a lotof the physiologists and
coaches at the Olympic TrainingCenter and they would come and
influence the next group ofcoaches and the next group of
athletes and so on and so forth.
And it's not because theydidn't recognize some of these
other areas of performance andareas of fatigue and namely the

(04:58):
brain, which is what we're goingto talk about today, but it's
just because of the way thatthey grew up and their bias and
their training and things likethat, and we're starting to
recognize more and more aboutthe kind of brain's role in this
.
And I think the best way toreally illustrate that is is how
this working model of fatiguehas evolved from purely a
biological one or purely aphysical one to a central

(05:20):
governor model, to use a termthat a lot of people will be
familiar with.
To now, what we're coining isthe psycho-biological model of
fatigue which you referenced inthat podcast, which kind of
merges everything together.
So we're getting there.
We might not get there yet andI could go through another 20
years of my coaching career andI would still probably have that
biological bias to it because Ikind of started out with it.

(05:42):
So kudos to you for rightfullycourse correcting the ship and
we're going to spend some timetalking about that.
So I think the best way tostart out about how fatigue is
actually multifactorial, right?
We talked in the last podcastabout some of the physiological
mechanisms that go into fatigueor, more specifically,
durability.
But why don't you likeilluminate for the listeners a

(06:03):
little bit about how thepsychological, or how the brain,
actually impacts some of thesefatigue mechanisms as well?

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, I'd be happy to do that.
And one thing I just like toemphasize is that I see the
world as all being physiologyright.
So I'm a neurophysiology guy,so I think about our perceptions
, our emotions, all of ourthoughts, our plans, all of the
things that go into our behavioris being grounded in physiology

(06:32):
as well, and I think I see myrole is really pulling things
that have been sort of viewed asnon-physiological and out there
maybe in the realm of sportspsychology into the realm of
biology.
So that's, I see that as thecommon platform for us to really
talk about all these issues.
So I think that's the commonground and, to be fair, I think

(06:54):
sports psychology maybe hasn'tdone the best job of rounding
itself and using the language ofbiology as a common vernacular,
and that may have created someof the gaps with other fields of
exercise science, but that's awhole other discussion.
So when I talk about fatigue, Ialways like to go back to the

(07:16):
studies that were done in thelate 19th century and I'll be
very brief about this, but Ithink they capture the essence
of what we're talking about here.
So amazing Italian scientistnamed Angelo Mosso, and the
exercise science world, themuscle physiology world in
particular will know that namebecause he had a lot of great
discoveries about musclephysiology, in particular

(07:39):
fatigue in muscles, and heformulated these laws of
exhaustion right Now.
Lesser known is that Mosso had areal interest in central
mechanisms of fatigue as welland he recognized things like
motivation is playing a reallyimportant role in when we reach

(08:00):
a state of exhaustion and don'tperform and can't perform
further.
Okay, so he acknowledged thatthere were these peripheral
mechanisms which you and Nicktalked really elegantly and in
depth about in the earlierpodcast.
But Mosso also talked aboutthere being central mechanisms,
and by central I mean brain.
But he was doing this in thelate 1800s and the tools for

(08:23):
really looking at that werepretty simplified.
Super clever guy.
He built this thing called anergometer where he could have
people lift a little weight ontheir index finger until they
couldn't move it anymore and hecould trace right on a rolling
sheet of smoked paper Brilliantright.
He could trace the amplitude ofthose movements.
He could track the force andthe speed of those movements.

(08:45):
He could track the force andthe speed of those movements.
So this guy is an incrediblegenius.
One of the coolest things hedid, I think, in lesser known
than his muscle physiology workis that he looked at how mental
fatigue affected the ability toperform work in his ergometer
task with the finger.
So he got his colleagues whowere busy lecturing and teaching

(09:07):
students and he would measurethem before.
They spent like five hours, youknow, examining doctoral
students' theses or something,and then measure them afterward
and what he showed is that theirability to do muscular work
went down based on the amount ofmental fatigue they had
sustained during that day ofacademic work.

(09:27):
And so those are really theseeds, I think, of appreciating
that there are both central orbrain and peripheral
neuromuscular mechanisms offatigue.
And now the traditional splithappens, right where exercise
science largely goes down theroad you were talking about with
Nick and working out inincredible detail the

(09:49):
physiological pathways that areinvolved in muscle fatigue and
durability.
Only recently have we startedto look back and say, oh, wait,
a minute, remember some of thosestudies on central mechanisms,
and there were others thatdribbled out along the way.
There's some work in the 1960son strength and so forth, but it
was the lunatic fringe.

(10:10):
Now, with the psychobiologicalmodel, basically what we have is
a modern and I think, a modernrestatement of what Malso and a
number of others in history havereally put together.
So you have the emergence oforiginal not trying to think of
the years, but I guess itdoesn't matter.

(10:30):
But Tim Noakes comes out withthe central governor there's
something in the brain that islimiting performance, and his
idea is that it's something on anon-conscious level that limits
us.
Sam Markora comes out with whatI see is a pretty similar
perspective, right, and sayswell, it's not non-conscious.
This mechanism is perceptionand motivation, and those are

(10:54):
conscious things, right.
That's what I see as the bigdifferentiator between the two.
And then Markora has done a lotof really beautiful experiments
, sort of trying to work out thedetails of his model From where
I sit.
Look, they're both coming fromthe exercise science world.
I'm looking at this as a guy whogot a PhD in perception right
and is originally trained as anexperimental psychologist, then

(11:18):
began using all these reallycool brain imaging technologies
in the 1990s when they becamewidely available.
Brain imaging technologies inthe 1990s, when they became
widely available From where Isit.
There are huge conscious andsubconscious contributions or
mechanisms that are at work, andso in a sense I think both

(11:38):
Noakes and Markora are ontosomething and I think, really,
from my perspective, this ideathat we have both central and
peripheral mechanisms and thatthe ultimate limiters that we
run up against in things like anultra, that barrier that slows
us down is a malleable barrier,is as indicated, you know, or

(12:01):
perpetrated by thepsychobiological model, is not
reaching our limit of theability to do work with the
muscles, but is stopping usbefore that.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
There's when you're going through that dialogue.
There's kind of two categoriesof study that I'm reminded of.
That I think illustrate thatpoint very well.
The first category is wherethey have blinded or rused
athletes performing a task tosome element of that task, and
there's been a lot of these.

(12:33):
I'm going to try to stylizethem as best I can and then you
can reframe it from your pointof view.
But they've blinded them tospeed, to power output, where
the end of the task actually ishow good they are doing, the
motivation that they receiveduring that task.
Sometimes they'll yell at themand sometimes they'll just like
sit there, you know, with theirarms crossed.
But some construction of thetask that they are doing whether

(12:56):
it's a time trial, a time toexhaustion test, a VO2 max they
kind of manipulate the situationand see what the difference is
in the outcome of the actualtask.
And the summary of that is thatwhenever they have blinded or
rused the athlete into it,typically they can do more work

(13:18):
than they thought they could.
So a great example is okay, youthink you're doing a 40
kilometer time trial on a bike,right?
You see the ticker kind ofcount down 30 kilometers to go,
20 kilometers to go, 10kilometers to go, three
kilometers to go, two kilometersto go, one kilometer to go, and
there's this kind of spike inperformance, this epic, you know
, kick to the finish line andthings like that, and then the

(13:39):
researchers say, no, you're notdone yet, you have another
kilometer and there's somereserve there, right.
So they've kind of rused theathlete into when the end of the
task is and there's somethingleft, there's something left
over.
The other category ofexperiments and there's a recent
meta-analysis that Sam Markarawas a part of, that you were
just mentioning is where they'veactually used a pharmacological

(14:01):
intervention to block thesensations going on at the level
of the muscle or the level ofthe nerve, so that none of that
input kind of reaches thesubject super spinally.
And what they find, by doingthat is, is there's no change in
the subject's rating of theirperceived exertion.
So let's think about this for asecond right.

(14:21):
You're doing a cycling task oryou're lifting weights or
something like that, and you do,you know, you go through your
exercise and you say, okay, thatwas, you know, a six out of 10.
That was kind of moderatelyhard.
Well, let's block the signals,all of the physical signals,
kind of coming back to the brainusing some form of pharmacology
, right, a nerve block or evenan end would kind of do the same
thing.
The kind of do the same thingthe subjects have the same

(14:43):
rating of perceived exertionwhen they're doing that exact
same task, which is actuallykind of remarkable, right, you
would think that you know inYen's, to quote Yen's Voigt, if
you could actually shut yourlegs up, that you would perform
better, right?
But here there's a relativelyrobust category of research that
would go to say that even whenyou can do that with a very

(15:04):
powerful pharmacologicalintervention and nerve block,
the rating of perceived exertionat least like how you are
perceiving that effort doesn'tchange at all, or maybe just
even just a little bit.
And once again, I think thatgoes to kind of like reinforce
your earlier point where we'rejust starting to recognize the
fact that these inputs that arecoming in, where we're

(15:24):
perceiving things to be hard orfast or towards the end point or
whatever, they influence ourultimate work capacity to a
great extent, and maybe evenmore so than the underlying
physiology.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, and I guess I would say that those things,
again, those things are based inphysiology, right, and I know
this is a hard thing to thinkabout.
But, like you and I are havingthis conversation right now, I'm
seeing you and hearing you,you're seeing and hearing me,
you're having thoughts and soforth.
All of that is a product ofphysiology, it's all a product

(15:56):
of brain physiology, and so yourperception of effort is a very
complex thing.
That is based on incomingsensory information that you're
getting, let's say, thosenociceptors, right, that are
giving you feedback from themuscles that have now been
blocked at the spinal level in alot of those studies.
So we could take that out ofthe mix.
But there's still somethinggoing on that is predicting

(16:19):
effort, right, and what is that?
Well, there's still adescending motor command, right,
and there's probably based onwhat we think we know about the
motor system, a copy of thatcommand that is usually being
matched against the incomingsensory information to gauge
effort and so forth, andinference copy, also, something
dating back to the late 19thcentury and hermeneutic.

(16:40):
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
But but there's also prediction.
We're constantly predictingforward, right?
So we're taking in all thismultisensory information, we're
interpreting it based on pastexperience.
What we think is going on inthe current situation right, and
our expectations about whatwe're going to need to do in the

(17:03):
future All of those things arebeing calculated in our brain
and they're truly physiologicalstates of the brain.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, I'm getting a kick out of your mention of
prediction because I'vemaintained the opinion that
endurance athletes are prettyterrible at it and they get more
terrible at it the longer theduration of the task actually
goes.
So I went over some of thestudies earlier where they'll
blind the subject to the end ofthe task.

(17:34):
Right, they think they'reending here, but they're really
ending there and there's alwayssome sort of reserve, right.
So that goes to that predictiveability.
I think that I'm going tosqueeze out every last little
bit of effort before this pointX.
But you can't do that becauseeven when they extend X by 5% or
10% or whatever, there's somecapacity left over to bring a an

(17:56):
example a little bit more hometo people in the ultra marathon
world.
We see this play out on the racecourse when people drop out and
immediately regret thatdecision and what they're going
through in their mind.
Marathon world we see this playout on the race course when
people drop out and immediatelyregret that decision and what
they're going through in theirmind many times not all the time
, but many times is I'm at mile70 and I feel like this I have

(18:17):
30 miles to go.
I'm extrapolating how I'mfeeling at the present moment to
30 miles later.
I don't think that's a tenablesituation.
I don't think that I can handleit.
I'm going to drop out.
And we see this play out liketime and time again in ultras,
where they make the decision,they get their wristband cut and
they immediately regret thatdecision 10 minutes later

(18:38):
because, lo and behold, theyfeel a lot better, right.
So they have erroneouslyextrapolated or erroneously
predicted how they would feel 10minutes after, whatever they
were kind of like feeling at thetime.
Okay, let's take a quick breakin the action and hear from CTS
coach Neil Pallas on this veryaspect.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
I tell athletes that our brain's job is to protect us
and so it's going to besensitive things like physiology
, safety, sense of belonging andeven self-worth, and a lot of
times it's going to be wrong onthat accuracy of the data it's
getting and that's where theperception piece is so big and

(19:24):
we think of those things as justthis filter and so it's going
to be skewed by those factors.
But let's get those basicthings absolutely wired.
Let's get physiology wired,let's get our sense of safety
wired.
What do we need to eat?
What do we need to do to feelsafe?
Even on a deeper level, wherethings can go wrong is that
sense of self-belief, feelinglike an imposter, or that

(19:53):
general sense of belonging.
Those things our brain isconstantly searching for and
that could be big as well, andwe need to be able to deal with
that head on upfront.
Like I mentioned, feelinghungry, tired, exhausted,
threatened by the elements aregoing to warp that perception
and our job as coaches andathletes is to help override
what it's telling us.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
This notion of prediction, or performance
prediction or exertionprediction, however you want to
put it I've actually viewed itas one is we try to hone it as
good as we can with athletes andencourage them to do certain
things in training, but at theend of the day, even with really
good athletes, the data saysthey're not all that good.
They're not all that good at it.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
No, they're not and that's why you referenced
earlier this notion of people,you know, sprinting the last 400
meters of their ultra orwhatever.
You can go back and people havedone this and look at you know
marathon times, boston marathontimes, and look at people who
are approaching the finisharound some really nice marker
like 245 or three minutes orthree hours, rather right.

(20:57):
Those people show a much more,a much quicker final mile right
because they're trying to get inunder that barrier.
So clearly they had reserveleft in the tank.
It's all the time the situation.
It makes a much quicker finalmile right Because they're
trying to get in under thatbarrier.
So clearly they had reserveleft in the tank.
It's all the time the situation.
It makes biological sense toprotect oneself in that way, but
it can.
It is a malleable thing.
So one of the things I do withathletes when in working on this

(21:19):
is not.
I take some of thosemanipulations that people have
used in the studies you'rereferencing and I use those in
training with athletes.
So I say you know, we're goingto go hard, we're going to get
together.
I usually do it in a bike sortof situation where it can be
tethered together in the worldof Zwift or something, and
you're not going to know howlong you're going to have to go

(21:39):
hard.
Right, I'm going to let youknow when this is up, but you
need to go all in because itcould be that I let you off the
hook in five minutes or it mightbe seven minutes.
Right, there's a big differencebetween that.
When you're really pushing hard, that's the nature of actually
road bike racing.
Right, you've got to stay inthe draft and other people are

(22:00):
setting the pace and you have noidea how long the suffering is
going to go.
But the key to winning a raceor doing well, is holding on to
the draft, right, and being ableto stick with it and get
yourself through and workthrough that belief that this is
going to be like this forever,because it's not right.
It's just that you don't havecontrol over it.
I know so.

(22:21):
I try to expose runners to thatkind of that kind of situation
because I think there's reallyvalue in doing that in training.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
I know a lot for the intensity or the time for the
next circuit whenever they comeback around.
So to your point of they'reintroducing unpredictability

(22:51):
they don't know how long theparticular intensity that is
going to be assigned is going tolast.
Is it going to last for oneloop or two loops, or four loops
or half a loop?
Is the whole workout going tolast for one loop, two loops or
four loops or anything like thatactually becomes a really good
exercise and a lot of peoplewill think that just sounds, you
know, sadistic or somethinglike that, because you're, you
know, kind of like torturing theathlete without letting them

(23:11):
know.
But it's actually like apsychological tool to introduce
that unpredictability in orderto kind of like teach this some
sort of flexibility with notsolely.
I guess the way I'm trying toarticulate this is not
pigeonholing yourself intoknowing when the task is
actually going to end.
Maybe you can eloquate that alittle bit better than I am in

(23:33):
terms of how that would actuallyresult in a performance
improvement.

Speaker 5 (23:42):
Okay, let's hear from CTS coach addison smith on this
as well one of the ways I liketo insert unpredictability into
training for my athletes isusing something like over under
workout, something popularizedby renato canova.
Ryan anderson really lovesusing these one of our cts
coaches and really for athletesthis is a great way to shake up

(24:04):
the normal work hard and thenhave predictable rest into a
specific training session.
So something like a four timessix minute threshold, followed
directly by four minutes atsteady state zone three or
lactate turn point one, and thenhaving four minutes of recovery
makes the athlete really haveto juggle with the idea of

(24:25):
they're not just at a certainrpe and then they have to turn
their braids off and recover.
They really have to strugglewith a point of dialing back
slightly some intensity, figureout what that rpe might look
like when they're already undersome fatigue, already under some
duress, and then go back torecovering again.
And this is a great way to prodan athlete that has had success

(24:46):
in the past with a normal blockof training.
They kind of know the routine ofwork hard, then rest.
Maybe they're ready for aninjection of some additional
stress and stimulus.
Or this is someone who's racingat the top end of a trail race,
an ultra race, and they need toget used to the high intensity

(25:06):
bursts or moves that are madethroughout a race and learning
how to cover them.
Learning how to surge, learninghow to then settle back into a
rhythm and knowing that they canhandle that when you know
starts to move hard on a climbin the middle of a race.
So I really like using that forexperienced athletes.
But for athletes that are morebeginners, getting the

(25:26):
principles of rest and recoveryand understanding the workout is
paramount and then, oncethey've kind of gone through
that cycle, they can start tolearn a few new things about how
to dial in the right RPE, addin some unpredictability or
learn how to manage a racesetting where they're trying to
battle for tough spots in a race.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, I think the key here is that we're working on
the model that your performanceis being limited by perception
of exertion and that pacing isbased on your estimations of how
long you can dole out thatenergy that you have available
to you.
But that pacing algorithmbecomes a lot more complicated

(26:10):
when there's an unknown variable, such as when you're reaching
the finish line or how long inan interval session you're
actually going to get to rest.
It's another way to play withthat, right, and so what you're
doing there is you're in somevery simple way to think about.
It is you're getting athletesto be comfortable with
uncertainty and willing to takerisks, and I think that's when

(26:34):
breakthroughs happen, right.
If you're playing it safe allthe time, you're being too
conservative.
You're never going to push alittle bit deeper and a little
bit further and find out wherethat limit for you really is,
and I think an athlete at agiven level of fitness, that
limit is a band, it's not a line, right?

(26:55):
There's a swath ofpossibilities there and, as
people who want to optimizeperformance for themselves or
for others, getting people totake risks, to step a little
deeper into that band, is whereit's at right.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
Well, and it becomes particularly important in
ultramarathon, not to, you know,degrade the rest of the
endurance sports, but becausethere is such a big gap between
the known and unknown, and I'vedescribed this any number of
different ways to athletes andcoaches and things like that.
If you take your prototypicalmarathoner, they're going to do
a 20 mile, 18 mile long run,right, which is 60, 75% of the

(27:34):
total distance that last 40 to25%.
They can conceptualize thatbecause it's 10 K, right, I mean
that's the go out, do a 10 Krun.
That's an easy thing for themto put together in their mind.
I've done this in training.
I have this leftover, thispiece that is leftover, I can
get kind of a good grasp on and,you know, put those pieces or

(27:56):
at least try to put those piecestogether.
Ultra is kind of completelydifferent, especially for people
that are like newer coming intothe sport, where there's, where
there's not only a hugedistance unknown, there's also
usually a huge time, unknown aswell, which can be double what
their longest training run is.
You're training for a hundredmile race, like the blueprint I
was using earlier, the persondropping out at 70 miles.

(28:18):
Your long run might be 30 or 40miles.
You just don't have thecapacity to run 75% of the
distance in a training run.
And even with experiencedathletes who have done multiple
hundred milers, that is only asmall fraction of their total
experience.
You know you get into thesereally experienced people that
have run 20, 30, 40, 50, ahundred milers.

(28:39):
That's still a very smallpercentage of their total
training or their total runningexperience.
So even in those cases, therace represents this huge, you
know, ocean of unknown betweenwhat they are normally used to
in training and what they'regoing to have to actually
encounter in the race, and thisskill that you just mentioned

(28:59):
just becomes that much moreimportant in those contexts.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
Yeah, and I think it's trainable.
I really do, and in ultras itis a unique situation I can see.
My longest ultra run was 50K,which I know has probably most
of your listeners snickering,saying barely not even you know
it was a marathon with a warmdown, but yeah, I think these
things are trainable, right.

(29:24):
And that gets me to thinking,you know, about what we're doing
when we're training.
When we're out there training,we're training all of these
things that you've been talkingabout in terms of muscle
physiology, remodeling ourhearts and so on, but we're also
training our brains and we'retraining these systems that are
creating our perceptions ordoing these estimations, and

(29:46):
those systems are both thelittle bit that sticks up above
the waterline.
You know the top of the icebergthat we're consciously aware of
, but there's a much biggericeberg of subconscious
calculations and computationsthat are going on that are
playing into that.
Regulation of effort is belowthat waterline as well.

(30:07):
So you're training all of thosethings right when you're out
there repeatedly engaging inthese activities, testing your
limits, pushing a little bitfurther, and so forth.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Okay, so let's kind of go for the jugular on that a
little bit.
We've set this up with theprevious podcast on durability.
We understand durability isimportant.
We're going to come in from thebrain side of things and in our
outline you've described a fewdifferent ways that you can
manipulate the feedback that theathlete is actually going to

(30:42):
encounter.
Why don't we kind of go throughthe categories of those first
and then a scenario where theymight actually execute it?
We talked a little bit about itin this.
Hey, we're going to manipulatethe duration or the intensity of
the interval and kind of likeshuffle things around.
But let's take a step back andjust think about it structurally
on the things that we canmanipulate and then go down one

(31:02):
by one on the like, thetechniques that you can like
literally use to accomplish that.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
Yeah, so I think your division is a really good one.
So the way I think about thethings we can manipulate, there
are feedback manipulations,which we've been talking about,
right, where we can useuncertainty, deception, and we
have to think about somethingelse that's becoming more common
in the running world now that'sbeen in the cycling world for a
long time which is we have allthese new streams of data that

(31:31):
are starting to emerge that aregiving us perceptions that
normally were imperceptible,right For the most part.
So we can know something aboutour core temperature.
Potentially we can knowsomething about our level of
blood glucose, and we can.
The old one, of course, isheart rate, but now there's even
power in running, and I thinkthose are things that have

(31:54):
potential for manipulation, butI also to advantage athletes.
But I also see them as having aflip side, which is, you know,
we, when we talk aboutmanipulating that boundary of
how far you can push, it's notjust a one way street, which is,
you know, when we talk aboutmanipulating that boundary of
how far you can push, it's notjust a one way street, man,
right, we're going to get moreout of it.
We can manipulate it in theother direction too right.

(32:14):
We can do things to compromisethe athlete's ability to go
further and I wonder sometimesabout whether we're doing that
with some of these additionalstreams of information that
we're adding in.
The brain has a limitedbandwidth for conscious
perception and processing and wecan measure that we've done it
for a long time in terms of ourconscious awareness attention we

(32:37):
also talk about that in termsof working memory has a limited
capacity and the more we loadpeople up with, the more
potential that has tooversaturate them, which could
also which could lead todecreased performance.
So one of the things practicalwith the athletes I work with is
I am I'm kind of rigid aboutsaying you know, I don't mind if

(33:01):
you use your trying to think ofa way not to tweak too many
noses, but very popular monitorsthat people are using aura and
whoop in these things.
They have a place, but I don'twant you wearing that thing for,
like, the week of a big event.
I just don't want you doing itbecause there's nothing good
that can come of it.
Really, I think if it gives youdata saying everything's good

(33:24):
to go well, that should be yourdefault assumption.
That should be something we'vegot established anyway, as
you're tapering, to go into yourbig event, you don't need a
whoop band or an aura ring totell you that.
Hopefully you don't get suedover this for me, but it's kind
of our job, right to deliver upthe athlete in the most ready
status they can be.

(33:44):
Of our job right to deliver upthe athlete in the most ready
status they can be.
But what if they do have atravel interference and you know
, crappy night of sleep and it'spouring rain for two days
before the big trail marathon ortrail ultra?
They're not going to get a goodreadiness score right and
what's that going to do in termsof their ability to feel able

(34:06):
to go deep on that day?
That's going to change thoseperceptions as well.
So it's a two way street and weneed to, I think, recognizing
that as one of the mostpractical things and doing what
we can to optimize the contextin any way that we can, way that
we can, so that an athlete isnot overwhelmed with data and is

(34:27):
able to go into the situationfeeling that I've been here
before, I'm confident about myability to handle what's ahead
of me and not overwhelmed withinformation.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Can I give you?
I know we're going to get intoan intervention in a second
because I can see you're goingwith this, but let me come in to
that point from apractitioner's perspective who
actually has to manage thisacross a lot of athletes in a
high performance situation.
First off, you're never goingto offend anybody if you're
going to throw some of thedevice manufacturers under the
bus.
I'm always really open andhonest about how I feel about

(34:59):
those things and I encourage theguests to be as well.
There's no sponsors on thisshow.
There never have been, soyou're not going to piss me off,
but there there's been a.
There has been a sentiment,especially in high performance
circles, around just what youhave mentioned.
So you have an athlete thatthey're training for months.
They're constantly gettingreadiness and fatigue numbers

(35:21):
and data from their wearables.
They come into a competitionand some component of their
environment changes and or theirtraining changes.
They taper, they travel, mightbe a different altitude,
different continent in manycases, and those readiness and
fatigue variables that aregetting measured or alchemized

(35:43):
in some way to change right.
So they change in some way andthat can definitely throw the
psyche of an athlete off.
We recognize that, even goingback to measuring resting heart
rate, you know way back it wasvery popular in the eighties and
nineties and things like that.
The way that a lot of coachesand athletes have started to
circumvent that is they'veblinded the athletes to those
numbers in competition.

(36:05):
That's one way and that haspositive and negative to it.
The athlete is okay with nothaving that, then okay, you can
get away with it.
But if they've always had itduring training and you take it
away proximate to the race, it'skind of those you're racing
different than your training,which is you try not to do that
right, you try to keep those twoenvironments as similar as

(36:27):
possible, and so it kind ofcreates the opposite of what you
were trying to do.
You were trying to remove thatstimulus initially because you
know that it's going to get allgummed up and what it actually
ends up doing is because theathletes are used to seeing that
and used to using that as a cuethat you have told them is a
good cue to use.
As a coach, you're now removingit.

(36:48):
There's anxiety that can creepup because of that.
I sat down with CTS coach AdamFerdinandson to hear his
thoughts on this particularaspect also.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Well, as far as managing athletes' relationships
with their data, I probablyspend more time working with the
perspectives and attitudesaround that data than maybe
actually working with the dataitself.
For example, a lot of athletescome in, they start working with
me and they really like to payattention to their heart rate
data and usually the direction Igo is de-emphasizing a lot of

(37:24):
this data.
There's a lot of reasons it canbe misleading or not the right
tool and not the best use caseall the time.
But a lot of that comes back to.
I see so often athletes have anegative reaction to that data
and oh, the run felt great.
But look at my heart rate valuesand I'm not always sure exactly
what they're even looking at orwhat their ideas are around it,

(37:46):
but I see it play a negativerole more often than not.
Same thing with HRV and metricslike that, where people are so
quick to look at the negativedays and maybe less quick to
look at the good days.
So I try to balance that out.
And one more piece that I'lladd is that what I'm most
interested in as an athlete ishow are you feeling so if we're

(38:10):
going to talk about HRV or whatyour resting heart rate was that
day.
I'd really like to also hearhow you're feeling, and more
often than not that's notbrought to the table initially
in those conversations.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
So quick question on that, adam how do you
specifically manage all of thedata that Strava gives you,
either comparing yourself toyourself or yourself to others,
because that's something thatinstantly comes up anytime that
you upload a run?
Is you always have your thirdon this climb and 20 seconds

(38:43):
faster or 40 seconds slower orwhatever?
It's nearly instantaneousfeedback?
How do you manage thatcomponent of it, because a lot
of times that's getting to theathlete even before the coach
has a chance to analyze things?
Yeah, that's a really goodquestion.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
I think I like to direct us towards the benchmarks
that we can control.
So maybe that's intervalperformance, Maybe it is a race
that they've done every yearthey do the same 10K race or
something like that and look atthose more clean examples where
we're really looking forimprovement.
There's always going to be aWednesday loop that wasn't as

(39:18):
fast as your loop was two yearsago.
I think that there's so manyvariables in that situation that
we can't control.
I'd much rather look towardswhere we can control it.
But I also have a lot ofathletes that are racing a
former version of themselves,maybe when they were younger or
something like that, and that'svery difficult to manage.

(39:39):
And I don't profess to have allthe answers there, but you kind
of just got to be honest andopen about it that in certain
situations those pastperformances may just be.
You know, it may be very likelythat you're not going to top
those again and I hope you liketraining in the meantime.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
So, personally, what I like to do not in all cases
but in many cases is I just takea lot of time to educate the
athlete on what those numbersmean.
Every day we talk about it,every week we talk about it.
When they go into like testraces we talk about what they
mean and so that way, when theyactually see whatever kind of
comes up for those scores closeto the race, they're armored

(40:22):
with information and they'rearmored with the context around
that and it has the.
It just has less of a chance ofkind of rattling, of kind of
rattling them.
The other strategy that I'veheard that you're going to love
and you've probably seen thisgoing back to manipulation is to
manipulate what the athlete isseeing and give them a positive

(40:43):
number somehow so they wouldtake the morning measurements or
they're going to get theirnight heart rate variability or
whatever kind of goes into it insome way deceptively, without
the athlete knowing and I haveknown people that have done this
without the athlete knowingthey introduce a positive number
or something that is going tothey think is going to elicit a
positive psychological responsein the days leading up to the

(41:07):
race and when I first saw thator when I first heard of it I'm
like you know what?
That's?
Actually kind of clever, like.
I can appreciate that.
But you only get one bite atthat apple.
You got one chance, you get one.
You better play it well.
You get one shot and if you hadan athlete that was doing one
competition and that was it,maybe you've got a use case

(41:29):
scenario for that.
But since they know that yourused them once, that ruse is
unlikely to work later down theline.
And even if you don't ruse them, they're always going to wonder
it.
So you might create a negativesituation later down the line.
And even if you don't ruse them, they're always going to wonder
it, so you might create anegative situation later down
the line.
So anyway, I bring all those upas a little bit of context for
the entirety of the story.
With some of these wearablesthat we've recognized some of

(41:50):
the overstimulation that canactually occur when we're
looking at them.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Yeah, and I think one role on a practical side for
coaches is to really think hardabout how much information is
helpful for an athlete to haveat any given time, and that may
well depend on the athlete andthe nature of how the coach
approaches things Something yousaid I think is really important
here in training versus racingand trying to keep those things

(42:16):
similar right.
So I think there would be, ifan athlete is feeling very
strongly or coach is feelingvery strongly about something
like heart rate variability, Ithink it would be really good to
for an athlete to getcomfortable performing on days
when their readiness score isgood and when readiness score
isn't so good and see that it ispossible for them to go well on

(42:40):
a shitty night of sleep, forexample.
You know a lot of famousathletes have terrible nights of
sleep before races and it'sstill quite possible to go out
there and have an amazingperformance and I think learning
about you know that and havingthat experience in training is
important, yeah, so that's why Itake the monitor away.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
typically it would have to be away for a week, yeah
, before an important event, youknow just to give the little
the listeners a little bit of awindow to how I personally how I
use some of these systems verypractically, especially for my
elite athletes, is I just havethem use an app that's really
popular, it's HRV.
For training.
They take a morning measurement, it's paired with a subjective

(43:23):
questionnaire and it gives themkind of a stoplight system for
the day.
You know green, go ahead and doit as planned, yellow is avoid
intensity and red is kind oftake the day off.
I will say that I'm lesssensitive.
Some people are kind of laughingmyself, but I'm sure the
audience is going to laugh justbecause they know my personality
.
I'm less sensitive to adoptthose, to adopt those

(43:44):
suggestions, because I realizethat I do want the athlete to be
able to perform when they havesomething adverse in front of
them, and in almost all casesthey can.
That's not to say that I nevertake those.
I will look at that every oncein a while and pair it up with
the rest of the context and say,okay, let's push this workout
around or let's manipulate thetraining here or there.

(44:07):
But I realized that we can'tlet the physiology and the
subjective questionnaire kind ofrule everything, that there are
other contexts to what we wantthe athlete to improve on, and
this is what we're kind of goingthrough is exactly one of them,
where you're going to have tobe able to perform when things
aren't perfect.
That is just part of the gig.
The training and training inlife are never perfect, and

(44:31):
being able to perform whenthey're imperfect is actually
quite a skill.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Yeah, and I think another way of just kind of
going with what you're saying isthere's the data, right, but
then there's what you thinkabout the data, and I would say
that what the athlete thinksabout the data is probably
having a pretty major effect ontheir performance, potentially
in either direction, and that'san important consideration as

(44:56):
we're moving further and furtherinto the realm of more and more
data.
Okay, so let's drill more intothe feedback in either direction
, and that's an importantconsideration as we're moving
further and further into therealm of more and more data.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Okay, so let's drill more into the feedback
manipulation piece of it, right,Because I know a lot of
athletes will kind of recognizethis as a failure point within
their own racing where they getto a point and they're overtly
focused on one thing their paceright their time that they come
into an aid station with.
And there are absolutelyinterventions that you can do in

(45:23):
training to help that athleteovercome those situations or
different permutations of thatin a race.
Why don't you go through someof the things that you're like
practically doing with theathletes to kind of hone them in
on that?

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Yeah.
So I can give you one exampleand this, I think, is probably
something you've used at onetime or another.
But I had an athlete who's areally great trail runner and he
had a race that was basicallystraight up a mountain and down
the other side, and one of thethings that we're working on is
getting him to take risks right.
So we reframed the race.

(45:56):
It wasn't an A race, it waslike a B or C level race for him
and I told him to race asthough the finish line were the
top of the climb, the top of themountain, when in actuality he
still had about a third of therace left after that.
And take that risk.
And I was confident that if hegot to the top and he ran as

(46:17):
hard as he could to the top,paced it out as though that's
the finish that he'd get downthe other side, and he did.
He had a big win actually.
Now, that could have gone south, right, it could have blown up,
he could have crashed and thatwould have been OK.
We are willing to take thatrisk on that day for him to see
a little bit deeper into hiscapacity, and I think it

(46:40):
actually worked well.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Okay, here's the final break in the action.
I sat down with all of ourcoaches and let's hear some of
their thoughts, okay, so Iwanted to bring everybody back
here to talk about this specificcomponent of what data do we
actually incorporate during arace, and my first exposure to
this was back when I wascoaching a lot of cyclists and
power meters just started tobecome prevalent out in the

(47:06):
marketplace and one of thethings that we started to do
immediately was to cover up thehead unit of the power meter
during a race so that theathlete wasn't biased towards
what they were doing, becausemany times they could actually
exceed their power output andrace as compared to training,
because they're tapered and it'swhat they've kind of like amped
up for and all the adrenalineof the race and things like that

(47:26):
.
But we recognized immediatelythat some data has the
capability of holding an athleteback.
Yet other data is useful toactually help meter out the
effort and how to perform better, and I was wondering if you
guys could come in as coaches toprovide some just like tips and
framework for the athletes outthere that are going to go out

(47:47):
during a race.
They've got all this, all thesethings that they could get from
their, from their smartwatch ortheir GPS watch.
How do you advise athletes onwhat data is useful for them to
track?
And we're going to start outwith you, addison.

Speaker 5 (48:02):
For me, I love telling my athletes that,
because the trail and ultra racehas so many variables already
added into the fold and thingsthat you need to adjust for on
the fly, whether it's weather orterrain or certain climbs,
simple is better when it comesto having internal data or watch
data that you're followingthroughout the course of a race,
and so I think the biggestthing that an athlete can take
with them throughout the courseof a race to meter out their
effort is just using an RPE talktest, for example.

(48:25):
The Leadville 100 is a very longrace.
There's a variety of climbs,you're at a variety of altitudes
, you're going to beexperiencing a lot of different
weather conditions, and so ifyou can, throughout the course
of a race, just internallylisten to yourself breathing,
try to talk to someone on thetrail, that's going to give you
a good idea of where you are interms of your overall effort.

(48:49):
And if we set your training upright and your preparation plan
up right, you should knowwhether that's a sustainable
effort to continue to run overthe duration of that race or for
a specific client effort tocontinue to run over the
duration of that race or for aspecific climb.
So, for example, in theLeadville 100, around 15 miles
into the race, you have thepowerline climb.
If you're a middle of the packrunner, you should be able to
talk comfortably to someone nextto you.

(49:11):
You shouldn't be breathing deepand labored because there's a
heck of a whole long way to goand you want to set yourself up
for success, and so an easy wayto do that is to just internally
take 30 seconds to really get afeel.
For how am I breathing, how amI talking?
If you're talking and it's notvery hard you know that you're
doing the right thing andsetting yourself up for the rest
of that hundred mile race.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Okay, so, since you mentioned Ludville, we got to
bring in Neil for this, becauseit's something that he's pretty
familiar with.
Neil, what do you have to say?

Speaker 4 (49:38):
Well, you know I'm going to start with the pieces
to ignore is number one whatother people are doing.
You know how far ahead they are, especially if you have a long
way to go in a race.
You know the longer distance,the further you are from the
finish line, the less it matters.
The closer you are to thefinish line, the more concerned
you can be, depending on thelevel of racing you're doing and
your goals.

(49:58):
You know.
Here are some things you haveto pay attention to have you
peed in the last couple of hours.
What color is your pee?
Knowing that physiology, is thepain you're feeling like a
tearing, ripping or scraping, oris it a general ache?
You know there's other painsyou don't have to pay attention
to Some you do.
Again, like Addison, I always goback to RPE.
You know, or does it feel likenine and you have one mile to go

(50:24):
?
Know where you are in that racematters too, because if you
have less to go you can goharder, ditch the heart rate in
a lot of situations.
And, like you said, coop, onthe bike.
I've biked Leadville a numberof times in the power meter,
turned on my power meter oneyear and it just wasn't working
and just went and that was oneof the best rides I had.

(50:46):
So it was.
You know that.
I think that's key Listening toyour body and learning,
learning from experience whatthose signals mean, which I
think that's key, and that's whywe do some of those long hard
runs as training runs too, andjust getting that experience.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Adam, what do you want to add into the mix here?

Speaker 2 (51:06):
One thing that athletes are going to look to to
evaluate their performancemid-race is going to be time
splits at certain aid stationsor landmarks, and that's
something that I've been doingmore and more lately is seeding
those expectations, and it canplay into when we are predicting
race times and predicting whatthose splits might be.

(51:28):
It usually looks like I'mseeding those expectations that
these splits are for planningpurposes, for time between aid
stations, nutrition and thingslike that.
They won't necessarily have ahigh level of precision enough
to go into an aid station andsay, oh, I'm five minutes behind
, I need to hurry up, my race isgoing poorly and on the flip

(51:52):
side, that plays into how areyou choosing that potential time
?
A lot of people will want toput their A goal at the
forefront.
Everyone has a prettyaggressive A goal, typically
maybe something that's possibleon the very best day, and I
think the psychology is prettyhard to get around that if you

(52:12):
come into an aid station andyou're still having a good day
but you're not on those splits,for most people you're still
going to have a negativeresponse.
So a lot of times I might havethem base their plan off of more
moderate or conservative splits, so then they see those signs
and say, hey, I'm ahead of theplan and that feels good.
Because I think it's hard tosee behind the plan and feel

(52:34):
good in that context.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
I've mentioned already that the playing games.
I like the bicycle, I like theindoor trainers where you have a
lot of control over thesituation for this, where you
can play games with pacing, withpower output, with duration and
interjecting uncertainty.
You could equally choose tointerject deception into that,
but it's not been the way I'veapproached it.

(53:00):
I think this uncertainty factoris a great one.
Again, it's what bike racershave to learn to do.
Road bike racers.
That's just how it goes.
You know, I was talking with afriend who was a former world
tour racer and he was saying Icannot tell you how many times I
was felt that I was at my limitand I popped only to notice

(53:22):
that the pace backed off in thegroup that I needed to stay with
to with to be in it for the win.
It backed off within the nextfive seconds, and then the
question is could you have goneanother five seconds right?
Probably so.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
those are some of the things that I think could be
brought in, that are a littleunconventional, that could be
brought into the running worldright I'm trying to think about
so this is me getting selfish onthe conversation, and all in an
effort of full disclosure,scott, I'm trying to think about
how I could do this from aremote setting.
So if I wanted to introduceuncertainty right With a trail
runner that I worked with andI'm located here they're located

(53:59):
in California or whatever howcould I construct a workout that
had some level of uncertaintyto it, cause ultimately I've got
to prescribe it, go out and runtwo hours, right, so that's
certain to be the two hours I'mjust trying to figure out, like,
how I would actually do thatWell.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
that's why I use the indoor trainer, because now we
have these indoor training apps,right you?

Speaker 1 (54:20):
got to help me out here, come on.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
Yeah, I'm telling you , I think well, here's what I
think I I'm doing this withrunners, right.
I'm making them get on theindoor bike, and I like the
indoor bike for getting gettingin work.
That is, you could call itcross training, but it's still
benefiting them in a lot of ways, without impact, right, so
they're minimizing the risk ofinjury.

(54:43):
The last thing I would want todo is play these games and get
someone hurt right, so that theycouldn't run.
So I love the indoor trainerfor that.
But the really beauty of thereal beauty of this is we can do
it remotely, right.
We can both get together orthey can get in.
I can throw them into anenvironment where I can control
the parameters, right, so I likeit for that.

(55:06):
You might give it a try withyour runners.
I'm going to 100% and I get.
It's not context specific.
I'm sure there are ways comingdown the pipeline.
Wahoo just released somevirtual running thing.
You can probably do this on atreadmill too, right?

Speaker 1 (55:21):
The Wahoo.
The new Wahoo treadmills lookabsolutely amazing, and it's
actually something that I'vewanted to see, or a couple of
their features, or some thingsthat I've wanted to see on
treadmills for a long time, themain one of which is the belt.
Speed will automatically adjustbased on where the runner's
position is on the belt, so ifyou think about you know

(55:45):
normally doing it.
Yeah, it's actually, really it's.
I mean, I can't believe peoplehaven't done it yet.
And this is we're going off therails with this conversation,
but I'm going to stay on it justfor a little bit and people
will check it out.
You think about the normal waythat you would manipulate the
speed on a treadmill is you haveto push a button.
I'm doing eight minute milesand I want to do six minute
miles.
I got a beep beep, beep, beepand then turn the thing up and
then the belt adjusts based onthat input.

(56:06):
Here there's a way that thetreadmill can sense you actually
speeding up or slowing down andthe belt actually adjust to
that.
So you're running an eightminute pace and then you start
running a six minute pace andthe belt adjusts automatically.
So I'm sure, with context tointroducing some of this, there
could be the same type of run, ashow that you're using with the

(56:30):
trainer, on, on on some ofthese new treadmills, and I
imagine some creative coachesare going to, you know, jump all
over that once they start toget out into the get out into
the space.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Yeah, it's very exciting, I mean.
Another thing that comes tomind to kind of veer, to kind of
move forward, and thinkingabout this is kind of hearkening
back to what we talked about inthe beginning, if you think
about the work I was describingat the start of our conversation
, saying that mental fatigueactually does affect physical
performance.
And, yeah, okay, maso was thefirst to show that, as far as I

(57:03):
know, late 1800s.
But there have been otherstudies replicating that down
the line.
I just saw one, for example,saying that had a nice design,
and they showed that socialmedia use within 30 minutes of a
workout causing mental fatigue.
Right, mental fatigue went up.
Performance in the workout wentdown compared to just passive

(57:24):
media like watching television.
So there's a very practical one.
What can we do to reduce mentalfatigue prior to key training
sessions, prior to competition?
Right, so get off social media,right.
So before, before a bigcompetition, it's not enough

(57:46):
just to taper and then spend allyour time fooling around on
Instagram or doing work Mentalwork.
That's fatiguing.
If you want to get the most outof yourself, you've got to
taper on the mental load as well.
That's tough for people.
Tough for me when I taper forraces.
My traditional thing to dowould just hunker down more on
work right, which has generallybeen mental work, but that's

(58:08):
probably not the best thing todo, and so thinking about ways
of reducing that load, alongwith your physical load, and
tapering both, is a wise thing.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
I'm familiar with that study and I actually am
very appreciative of the designnot to give a knock to the field
that you're in, scott but Ifeel that a lot of the mental
fatigue studies that they havedone in the past rightfully so
are a little bit over contrivedand not based in reality, and so
typically, what they would doyou can more elegantly describe

(58:39):
this than I can, so if I totallybutcher it, please I'm not
going to take offense if youcorrect me is they will.
In order to mentally fatigue themental fatigue group, they'll
have them do some tasks thatnobody would ever do in real
life.
They're doing math problems orthey're solving some sort of
computational thing on a screen,matching up colors to words and
things like that toartificially induce this mental

(59:01):
fatigue.
And while I appreciate thebasis that those studies have
actually provided when we'relooking at these things, it's
not something anybody wouldactually do before race, right,
but people will get on Instagrambefore race, people will get on
Twitter before race.
People will do that duringtheir taper in substitution for
training, absolutely.

(59:21):
So the translation into thislike real world application of
mental fatigue is something thatI'm very much appreciative now
because finally we can make thelink between this.
We think that all this mentalfatigue has an effect in these
kind of contrived contexts.
What does it actually look inthe real world, with these
substitution activities thatpeople are actually undertaking

(59:42):
during their tapering periods orbefore training or whatever?

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Yeah, it's very hard, right.
These are big challenges in ourworld generally how do we use
our time, how do we give ourmind and our brain breaks and
they're not just fornon-athletes and non-athletic
endeavors.
They really do affect ourperformance.
So that's another practicalthing that I think is fairly
low-hanging fruit that peoplecould be looking at.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
Can we take the opposite approach, though?
So we know that mental fatiguein any race is, or any in any
endurance event, is actually areal thing that people have to
combat, and I will make theargument and there's research to
support this that we'vereviewed in our research group
that it actually is a biggercomponent of performance than we

(01:00:27):
probably actually give itcredit for.
Can we actually train that,though, by doing the things that
we know are mentally fatiguingand then going out and
performing a task?
So in that way, you would besubstituting the physiological
capacity of the task for theimprovement or the fatigue or
the stress that's based on thephysiology or placed on the

(01:00:48):
physiology, with some sort ofimprovement that you can get in
the mental fatigue or some sortof durability that you can
improve.
On the mental fatigue side ofthings, can we do interventions
that actually would make adifference there?

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Yeah, it's an interesting question and I think
it's one that Sam Markora'sgroup has dug into and they have
.
I may butcher the name, but Ithink it's called brain
endurance training and I thinkthat's the idea right, that you
give people challenging tasks,and what I don't remember off
the top of my head is whetherthey're doing them
simultaneously with enduranceactivities, or I seem to think

(01:01:24):
that there are things people didin a lab setting, but I could
be wrong.
One of the things about how welearn right, one of the things

(01:01:55):
about about how we learn Rightand what we're talking.
Challenging activitiesintroducing them during the
physical performance would bethe optimal way to do it.
Running right again, that'sanother advantage for a cycling
ergometer situation, right wherepeople can be.
You could envision how youmight give them dual tasks, sort

(01:02:19):
of situations to work on.
Spend a lot of research inpsychology on doing multiple
things at once, dual tasking andso forth.
People get better at thosesituations, primarily between,
by getting better at switchingbetween the two things, and I
don't know why that couldn'twork in this kind of context as

(01:02:40):
well.
I just don't know a lot aboutwhat's being done.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Yeah, I mean I've heard coaches and performance
psychologists alike do thingswhere you do a set of intervals
and then you do a set ofintervals and solve math
problems right or spell words inyour head is another one that
I've that I've heard of.
Or if they are in a stationary,if they're kind of a stationary
setting, they're on a bike oron a treadmill, they'll have

(01:03:04):
some sort of matching game toplay on an ipad or something
like that as a technique to Idon't even know how to
articulate this, this is sodifficult for me to to to build
better capacity to resist mentalfatigue.
How's that?

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Yes, okay, and I think that's the idea behind the
brain endurance training stufftoo, yep.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
I'll link up that app .
I'll link up that app in theshow notes.
A couple of our coaches haveactually used it.
Used it, Go ahead, Scott.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Yeah, cool.
I mean, we do know that whenpeople are physically depleted,
that cognitive performance goesdown as well.
So that two-way street right,we've been talking about mental
fatigue affecting physicalperformance, but it goes the
other way too, and so some ofthese tasks that are
particularly sensitive and putyou under a lot of demands for

(01:03:53):
speed or accuracy or both, havea sensitivity to your recovery
status, and that's somethingthat's not been pursued that
heavily, but I think there'svery good potential there and
that, down the line, it might besomething that we see people
utilizing not only for trainingbut also monitoring recovery.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
Yeah, all the classic studies that they've done on
the military, where they've hadthem do either a physically
exhausting task or even a sleeprestrictive type of setting and
then perform like marksmanshiptests, is the classic way that
they'll do it and then they'llhave an intervention, whether
it's a nutrition intervention,training intervention or
whatever, and then compare, youknow, series A to series B to

(01:04:36):
see if the intervention actuallyworked.
A lot of those are actuallyquite remarkable.
You know where thoseinterventions can be, can be
extremely powerful and, as youcan imagine, it's high
importance to the military to beable to operate in those
conditions.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
We're very responsive to training, and that's true
for muscles and hearts, and truefor brains as well.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
So, okay, I want to talk a little bit more on the
intervention side.
Right, we talked about how wecan manipulate feedback
potentially to improve.
We talked about how some ofthese mentally fatiguing tasks
could actually have animprovement in the way that your
mental fatigue would not decayas fast or to the same extent if
you did some of this training.

(01:05:15):
What are some of the otherbrain or the central
manipulations that we can makeduring training that would
actually have an impact on anultra marathon runner?

Speaker 3 (01:05:26):
so one that I think is an interesting and perhaps
more interesting for ultrarunners than it is for people
who race on the track, forexample is thinking hard about
the warm up.
So one of the things we knowabout pain and perception of
effort is that both of thoseestimates, the both of those
perceptions, are able to beaffected by what we do

(01:05:51):
immediately before them.
Preconditioned right, we cantake someone in the lab and we
can test their tolerance forpain by having them stick their
hand in an ice bucket filledwith water and see how long they
can tolerate it.
One thing that's interesting isthat people can tolerate it for
longer if we've done a briefpre-exposure, so they've got a

(01:06:14):
taste of what the pain is goingto be like beforehand, and there
are other pain studies thatshow this as well.
I think that this is animportant thing to consider when
constructing a warmup routine.
I know ultra runners and evenmarathon runners who are
generally pretty casual aboutdoing any kind of warm up and

(01:06:37):
might use the first few miles ofthe race as the warm up, and I
think that, while that mightmake sense from the conservation
of energy and so forthperspective, they might be
leaving something important onthe table here.
Forth perspective, they mightbe leaving something important
on the table here.
I think that it's important forathletes to get a taste of what
they're about to experience inthe competition or in the hard

(01:07:01):
training session.
So I think having a morerigorous warm-ups where you
touch all of the zones thatyou're likely to touch during
the event is important for notjust muscle and cardiovascular
reasons, but for preconditioning, adjusting that threshold of

(01:07:22):
tolerability from a centralnervous system perspective as
well, and so that's something tothink about.
With ultra runners.
It may be a hard sell to getpeople to do a hard warm-up pre
prior to a hundred mile run yeah, let me give you the.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
I'll speak for the audience, right, that's, that's
the hard sell here.
I'll try to speak as much as Ican to the audience.
A lot of people will say, well,if I'm going to experience that
during the race already, won'tthe experience during the race
actually, to use your vocabulary, precondition you to the pain,
the exertion or whatever thatyou're going to experience

(01:07:59):
throughout the race, because itis so long?

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
I suppose.
So I guess my thinking has beenmore along the lines of wanting
to be prepared for it the firsttime it hits.
So when you first, when the dogfirst bites, you're not totally
caught off guard and don'tspiral into the sort of negative
self-talk and negative thinking, and I think it can be an

(01:08:22):
effective way of immunizingpeople, at least in part, from
that shocking experience.
But I see your point insomething as long as an ultra.
I'm often thinking aboutshorter things where you've got
to stay with your competition ina more through accelerations
and things of this nature,probably more important in those

(01:08:44):
circumstances.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
But I think it's an interesting question, especially
for people who are closer tothe pointy end of the spear and
ultras, where they really arehaving to match their
competition yeah, I think thatthere's the better use case
there of where in ultras arestarting to get like this even
at the 100 mile distance, wherethere is a lot of definitive
separation in the race.
That occurs through deliberateincreases in intensity.

(01:09:08):
And many times at least in myobservation, and I'll leave that
as a pretty critical caveat inmy observation some of those,
when those happen, the athleteshave the physical capacity to
handle whatever's in front ofthem.
But there's something that thatelse that is going on.

(01:09:28):
Either it's this perceivedexertion endpoint interaction,
which is a term that we haven'tbrought up yet but is what we
were describing earlier.
They're trying to forecast howthey're going to feel later down
the race in the present time,which we know that we're
actually kind of terrible at orthey're trying to pace
themselves out through theentirety of whatever is going on

(01:09:50):
, and that doesn't the move orthe increase in intensity
doesn't really fit in there inthat construct.
You know, I was just reminded,scott, when you went over that
this sort of inoculation effectalmost right that an athlete can
have for future bouts when theydo a little bit of a taste of
that intensity.
I was reminded a little bit ofour conversation earlier that we

(01:10:11):
had.
That I'll bring up for thelisteners so they don't have to
listen to the entire episode inadvance.
You're more than welcome to dothat if you want to.
Where a phenomenon that we haverecognized in coaching and
haven't been able to explain foryears is that if we give
athletes workouts, hard workouts, on consecutive days, many
times or or even most times,they'll perform better on the

(01:10:34):
second day as compared to thefirst.
And our physiological bias ofcoaching really kind of got
shown when we were trying tounwind that problem, because we
couldn't explain why theyshouldn't have more capacity,
they shouldn't be able toperform better on the second day
as compared to the first day.
But now that we kind of look atthings through a little bit of a

(01:10:55):
different lens, this uh, thisuh it's almost like an
acclimation process, right Tothe exertion or to the intensity
that you actually experience,experiencing.
That gives the athlete a bettercapacity to handle it the
second time around becausethey're so, so, so proximate to
each other.
We have seen that for years incoaching and it's actually a

(01:11:16):
coaching technique that I, whenI started working with ultra
runners, I kind of gotcriticized for because it wasn't
as common in running, as it isin cycling and in triathlon.
But now that we have a littlebit of a better like framework
around it, we absolutely haveways that we can describe why
that might be the case.
Even though the physiologicalcapacity might be deteriorated
from one day to the next, thereare other things going on that

(01:11:39):
might actually improve theoverall capacity of the athlete
that's a very interesting thingand I can relate to this in a
little bit different way,thinking about when I was
running competitively.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
My one of my staple workouts was four by one mile on
the track or four by 1600.
And inevitably the worst of thefour in that workout was the
first one.
It's a shock and probably right,and probably those of you who
know more about musclephysiology than me would have a

(01:12:13):
lot, of, a lot of things arecertainly going on, right, but
this was after being well warmedup and ready to go and
everything and always it wouldbe.
The second and third ones wouldbe better.
The fourth one would usually betough, but not as tough as the
first, and I often wondered howmuch of that was my perspective
and, having recalibrated myability to get through the

(01:12:34):
misery of, you know, the thirdand fourth trips around the
track.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
I just came up with a good way that we can introduce
uncertainty and go out and do aset of intervals.
I always come up with thesecrazy things when we are on the
podcast.
I don't do this with otherguests, it's just you.
I love it.
It's just you.
This is where we learn newthings.
Yeah, maybe I mentioned thatthis is seemingly familiar to me
, so maybe it's not as originalas I initially thought it was.

(01:13:00):
Go out and commit to doing aduration of interval, but you
don't know the number, exceptfor the minimum number.
So you're going to go out anddo three minute intervals.
Your minimum is four and yourmaximum is eight.
So you have four pieces of youknow, wadded up paper in your
vest or whatever, and one ofthem says stop and the rest of

(01:13:22):
them says go, and you do theintervals until you pull the one
that says stop out.
So you're kind of controlling.
I guess what I'm thinking isyou're still going to accomplish
the right or an effectiveworkload of time and intensity,
but you introduce theuncertainty of whether, when
it's actually going to stop, isit going to be after the fourth
one, the fifth one, the sixthone, things like that and so you

(01:13:42):
kind of get you can kind ofkill two birds with one stone
with that deal.
Maybe I'll try that next weekon myself and report back.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
I love it.
It's a low tech way to do itand I could see doing it in a
slightly higher tech way.
You could always make a littlerecording for your athletes
right there you go Through theirearbuds.
But yeah, why not?
The other thing I was thinkingabout as we were talking there's
a good bit of data on theinternal voice that we all
battle with when the going getstough, and one of the

(01:14:11):
interesting things from workingin functional magnetic resonance
imaging is looking at what'sgoing on when people are
speaking out loud versus whenthey're engaged in internal
dialyzer right a lot of the samemechanisms are at work.
Not all of them because you'renot sending the motor command to
articulate the sound, butbecause the same mechanisms are

(01:14:34):
going and people can try thisfor themselves.
If you want to shut up thelittle voice in your head, just
start talking out loud.
You can't do both at the sametime.
It ties up the mechanism and ifthe little voice in your head
is giving you a lot of negativestuff that's helping to sway
your perception that it's timeto drop out and cut the

(01:14:56):
wristband, then having somethingthat you've pre-planned, that
you can say positive to overridethat voice out loud, might not
be a totally lunatic idea and itsurely will get your
competition looking at you in avery curious way and that might
have value as well so maybe jensvoy was right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
After all, we're going to do like a 360 degree on
this, him actually verbalizingeither in his head or out loud
shut up.
Legs took up enough bandwidthso they actually did shut up
perhaps I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:15:31):
I would never doubt jens the ability to suffer.
I I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:15:33):
I would never doubt.
Yes, the ability to suffer.
I, I love it.
I love that we came full circleon that.
Okay, let's try to come up withsome concluding points, right,
yeah, we've gone through anumber, like a number of
different interventions and, Ithink, given people some good
ideas of things that they cantry in concert with the training
that they were already doing.
I think that wadded up, youknow, pieces of paper that I was
mentioning earlier.

(01:15:53):
That was my attempt to say,okay, I'm already doing this.
How do I introduce some aspectof uncertainty within a
framework that I would prescribeanyway up in terms of things

(01:16:14):
that ultimately limit ourperformance and some of the ways
that we can get around that orthat we can actually train to
make those limiters better?

Speaker 3 (01:16:18):
yeah, I keep coming back to where we started right,
that fatigue is both driven bychanges in peripheral systems.
So so by that I mean muscles,peripheral nervous system and
central mechanisms right thebrain, and that we have to

(01:16:38):
respect the fact that mentalfatigue has implications for
physical performance, just asphysical fatigue has
implications for physicalperformance and for mental
performance.
And so I think that thephilosophy that has been
prevalent in traditional sportsscience, that looks only at the

(01:17:00):
periphery, is limiting, both interms of the research questions
that are getting asked and inactual practice out in the field
where both things are at play,and that, as coaches and
athletes, we need to think morebroadly when we're looking for
ways to optimize performance andget serious about training some

(01:17:23):
of these other systems.
In using some of the tools thatwe've been outlining here are
possible ways that one couldapproach that.
It's early days.
We haven't really got a laundrylist of things we can't say
well, you know, we can tell youhow to work on your VO2 max and
we can tell you, we canprescribe intervals that target

(01:17:44):
different energy systems.
We're not quite there yet, butwe do have a number of ideas, in
some of which we've expressedin our conversation today that
people could be trying to bringin, and I think the key thing
here is trying to focus on theimportance of the perception and

(01:18:05):
the role that plays indetermining our limiters.

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
Is perception really our reality?

Speaker 3 (01:18:12):
I think perception is very much our reality and that
we're constructing it all thetime, and that has been really
mostly what I've done for thelast 30 years is try to make
little dents in ourunderstanding of how that
happens.

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
Okay.
So I'm going to pin you down onthis question and you can hate
me for it or not, but I I'mgoing to pin you down on this
question and you can hate me forit or not, but I'm not going to
let you escape without givingsome sort of answer to it.
A lot of listeners and includeand I'll put myself in this
category as a coach.
One of the things I'mconstantly evaluating is the
strength of the intervention.
So we take all of these thingsthat we only have a limited

(01:18:53):
number of things that we can do.
Right, I can construct aworkout, I can provide three or
four pieces of instruction onthat workout, and what I'm
trying to do is to make surethat intervention has the
maximum amount of impact that itactually can, or the maximum
amount of improvement eventuallythat it actually can, and we
have realistic framework forthis right.
I mean, you mentioned some ofthe studies that we've done.

(01:19:15):
There are any number of thingsthat look at interval
intervention studies.
We do a set of intervals foreight weeks.
We can test the athletesbeforehand, we test the athletes
afterwards, whether it's VO2max or time to exhaustion or
whatever, and they improve by Xright.
It's usually some meaningfulimprovement three, five, maybe
10%, if you get really luckywhere you have a really good

(01:19:37):
intervention maybe not a goodgroup or not as advanced of a
group or whatever, but I guessmy point with that is is it
gives us context for things thatwe can do from a training
perspective that work betterthan others.
If you were to extrapolate whatyou know about some of the
interventions that you justmentioned, how valuable are they

(01:19:57):
in the context of everything?
When an athlete is traininganyway, is it going to make a
market improvement in theirperformance?
And you can draw on whateveryou want to.
You can draw on the research oreven the practical experience
that you've had with athletes.

Speaker 3 (01:20:09):
Well, here's an interesting thing to think about
, and I'm going to draw onmedicine and medical research
because I think a lot of theways we approach questions in
sports science is based off howquestions are approached in
medicine.
In medicine there's a goldstandard for evaluating, say,
the effectiveness of a drug.
It's a randomized,double-blinded clinical trial.

(01:20:31):
So there's the randomizedpeople don't know if they're
getting the drug or the placebo.
The double-blinded part meansthe patient doesn't know, and
neither does the person runningthe trial.
Right, the randomized partmeans they don't know which
group they're getting into.
And so in those trials, whatyou see is that it sets up an

(01:20:53):
expectation in the individualswho are enrolled that they might
be getting the treatment Okay.
So there's a great meta-analysisthat pulled together almost 200
clinical trials ofpharmacological agents,
surgeries, behavioralinterventions, for just a
plethora of different medicalconditions, and they looked

(01:21:16):
across all those trials and theylooked at how big the magnitude
of the placebo response.
Right, the group who actuallygot not the actual active
ingredient.
If we want to think about it indrug terms we got the sugar
bill.
How big of a response thatgroup showed relative to the
response that got the actualdrug.

(01:21:36):
Do you want to guess how, what,what.
The percentage of response ofthe interventions could be
attributed to placebo oh 98% ofthose, yeah, 90.

Speaker 1 (01:21:49):
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 (01:21:51):
You're an optimist or pessimist?
So it's fifty four percentacross all of them.
But that means that, you know,if we assume that our training
interventions that we're givingpeople are prescriptions for
their intervals and long runsand weights, whatever we're
doing for them, are in some wayscomparable to those medical
interventions and there's a lotof assumptions there, right, it

(01:22:14):
would suggest that about half ofthe response the athlete shows
is due to the overall context,and that context is comprised of
several things their beliefs,their perceptions, their
expectations.
Their beliefs, theirperceptions, their expectations,

(01:22:40):
the context that your brain iscreating around whatever you're
experiencing in that treatment.
And so I think we need to takethat seriously and I think in in
medical research and this ischanging, but in sports science,
I think it's slower to changewe say, well, placebo, that's
fake, right, that's not real.
But think about it for a minute.
Your perceptions, yourexpectations, your beliefs are
grounded in physiology of yourbrain.

(01:23:02):
Science is based on the notionthat things happen for a reason,
that there are cause and effectrelationships.
So there are physiologicalmechanisms that are causing your
perceptions, causing yourbeliefs and so forth, and at the
same time, those mechanisms areplaying a role in how your
body's responding to these otherinterventions.

(01:23:24):
They're changing your and wecan show this we can look at,
for example, pain networks inthe brain in people who actually
got the placebo instead of theactual opioid, and what you see
is that the pain networks of thebrain are modulated in response
to that sugar pill.
Now you can get that same sugarpill in a different context and

(01:23:44):
you can show that it'llmanipulate other systems in the
brain, for example, in thecontext of a study on
dopaminergic drug, a drug thatups dopamine.
These are powerful things andthey're grounded very much in
our biology and they affect therest of the body, including the
immune system.

(01:24:05):
So I think we need to be takingthat stuff more seriously and
not dismissing it as fake andnonsense.
Right, these effects are comingfrom somewhere and they're
coming from biology.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
I'm still going to pin you down and I'm going to
use the.
I'm going to use context withthe real.
I'm going to kind of blend afew athletes that I'm working
with right now to help youarticulate this ultimate answer
here.
So I work with a number ofelite athletes and they've kind
of maximized their physiologicalcapacity.

(01:24:36):
I can bring them into the ourlab or a nice lab here in
Colorado Springs and I can testthem now and I can test them
three years from now and thosetests are going to be almost
indistinguishable despite all ofthe training interventions that
I can throw at them.
They're going to have verysimilar VO2 max numbers, if not
exactly the same.
They're going to have verysimilar running economy numbers,
kind of on.
Yet the performance can stillchange.

(01:24:57):
So why does the performancechange?
What are the other variables atplay that can improve
performance, despite thephysiology?
That's what we started with,having a physiological bias and
starting to kind of break out ofthat.
How can that performanceactually improve when the
physiology is exactly the sameand we can actually measure that
?
To be to be very close and thisisn't just my athletes, we've

(01:25:19):
noticed this a lot with eliteathletes.
So they learn to race is one ofthem.
They just execute the racebetter.
There's something on thepsychological side or the brain
side of things that isinfluencing the performance
outcome to a greater extent thanthe physiology is, because the
physiology is zero, right,that's the amount that it's

(01:25:41):
actually improved.
And there's another.
There's a whole other types ofyou know themes to that or
theories around why thatactually might be the case.
But that's how I have actuallyexplained it to to my athletes
is, yes, we're going to doeverything that we can in
training, but I've gotten you tokind of close to your maximum.
You know we think aboutphysiological adaptation.

(01:26:02):
It has a asymptoticrelationship to it.
Eventually there's just no moreroom to visit, there's no more
capacity to build right with alot of these, with a lot of
these very good athletes thathave been trained, that have
been training for years, and soyour improvements are going to
come from duties, as otherwisespecified, and the training.
Not that we discount thetraining, it's all of the other

(01:26:23):
things.
So, while I might be able to get10% improvement out of an
athlete, initially, just on thephysical side, and that might be
relatively easy, and all theother incorporations might be 2%
, 1%, 5% or whatever.
That's not true.
After three, four, five, sixyears of having a robust athlete
history, that physiologicalimprovement might be 1% and all

(01:26:45):
the other things mightcontribute to greater than that.
So I kind of ask you again,like where does what we just
talked about, the brain, kind oflie in that cascade of effects
with an athlete and theirultimate performance?
And you can once again rack andstack it to physiology, or rack
and stack it, you know, withthe whole athlete.
But what I want to leave thelisteners with is some sort of

(01:27:08):
like internal hierarchy for lackof a, a better word of where
this can all lie yeah, so Ipromise you it wouldn't be easy.

Speaker 3 (01:27:18):
No, you're brutal, I love it.
Here's an experiment, a littlethought experiment.
If, if what you're sayingwasn't true, we could just bring
everyone in the lab, test themand never have the race right,
just get, just give out themedals there yeah that's right
and that's just not how it works.
And we can.
There are plenty of examplesyou can look at.

(01:27:38):
I keep going back to cyclingbecause cycling is just easier
to define.
There, you know your listenersmay or may not be familiar with,
there's a in cycling there'ssomething called your functional
threshold power, your FTP,everyone there's a bit cycling.
There's something called yourfunctional threshold power, your
FTP, everyone.
There's a bit of an obsession atthe moment with athletes kind
of bragging about their FTPs ortrying to maximize their FTPs,

(01:28:02):
as though that we're going to bethe total determinant of who's
going to stand on the podium.
And we know it's not.
It's just not true.
So what other things are goingon?
Well, the racecraft is reallyimportant and the racecraft is
knowledge and experience.
Right, it's a central nervoussystem thing, it's a brain thing

(01:28:24):
.
There is the ability to getcomfortable with being
uncomfortable and the ability tojust draw on that experience
and go a little bit deeper.
I could think of the first raceI ran and I'm old, I'm 59 in two
weeks.
I can remember the first race Iran.
I was 17 or 18 years old and Ithought, oh my God, how does

(01:28:48):
anyone do this?
It's absolutely horrendous.
I was so painful and I got doneand I couldn't wait to do the
next one.
Right the story?
Many of us have, but I got a lotbetter at going deeper, and an
ability to tolerate thatdiscomfort is something that is
improved through training andthrough practice, and we're

(01:29:09):
getting a lot of that just bythe kind of training that we do,
the hard training that we do inpreparing for our competition.
I think it's interesting tothink about whether and I don't
know that we have a ready setanswer to the question of what's
the optimal way to improve thatfor every athlete.

(01:29:30):
There probably isn't one, justlike there isn't one way to
improve endurance in everysingle athlete or speed in every
single athlete.
It's probably going to be moreof getting to know the athlete
and getting to know how to workon that, doing some of the
things we've talked about andprobably a whole bunch of other
things I haven't even thoughtabout and that the field hasn't

(01:29:50):
thought about yet.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):
Yeah Well, I have athletes that are starting to
put all of their sportspsychology and their brain
coaching actually in trainingpeaks, and you'll find this
fascinating.
So the typical context isthey're working with somebody on
the mental side or their sportspsychology side whatever
vocabulary you want to use andthat provider will be plugged

(01:30:16):
into Training Peaks, which isthe coaching platform that I use
as a coach essentially andprescribe some of their stuff in
Training Peaks, and I did notappreciate how remarkably
effective that was going to beuntil after about four weeks of
interfacing with it, because Iknew exactly the not exactly,

(01:30:39):
but I had a very good frame ofreference for what the athlete
was having to go through from amental skills perspective, in
conjunction with what I wasprescribing from a physical
perspective.
And then I could reinforce thatand then the practitioner could
reinforce what I was doing.
And so to my point earlier to.
I'll pin myself down.

(01:31:01):
I think in an elite athletecontext, the this component that
we're just talking about is asimportant, or even more
important than the physiologicalgains that you can get, for two
reasons One, the mentalexercise that you just went
through, but also the fact thatthe physiological capacity has a
very limited room to run forwhatever reason, right, just

(01:31:23):
duration of the time thatthey've been training.
They've kind of maximized theircardiopulmonary system.
That part is not infinitelymalleable, right To use some
technical jargon.
I do think that it is kind ofon equal weight as compared, or
even a greater weight ascompared to the physiology,
which is kind of a remarkablestatement coming from me, having
biological bias, as you veryrightfully, as you very

(01:31:45):
rightfully pointed out.
I think that's a prettyremarkable statement.

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
Yeah, I think where this is all headed, jason, is
that you know, we've known for along time that if we want
people to be faster runners, wedon't just tell them to go out
and run around.
We give them prescriptions forstructured training that has
certain characteristics it'sprogressive, it's periodized and

(01:32:08):
so on, and we could argue aboutwhat the best systems are,
whether there is a best systemfor a given athlete, but I think
that's where this is all gotahead too, because for too long
we've thought that all of thisother business that we're
talking about now optimizing themental side of things, the
brain side of things will justnaturally fall out of whatever

(01:32:31):
physical training program we'rehaving people do.
And I think we're beginning torealize that's not necessarily
true and that there are wayswe're going to be able to
optimize that as well, andthat's going to require other
forms of expertise,collaborating with coaches,
deliberate practice.

Speaker 1 (01:32:48):
Traditional coaches.
That's right.
Deliberate practice, deliberatepractice, traditional coaches,
deliberate practice I alwayskind of keep coming back to that
.
Is is like yeah, you canimprove your skill on shooting
free throw, for example, by justdribbling around the basketball
court and shooting shots fromwherever that they can improve
your free throw shooting acumen.
But if you get on the freethrow line and shoot 500 free
throws, that's a better tool todo it.

(01:33:10):
It's the same thing.
You're going to get some mentalskills development by running
hard, running at a variety ofintensities, challenging
yourself and things like that.
But you'll get better at themif you're deliberately focusing
on them through something.
And yeah, we might not have thebest periodized scheme approach
to it.
My colleague, justin Ross, hastried to start to put this

(01:33:31):
together and I think we'regetting, you know, pretty
reasonable frameworks based offof research and experience.
We might not be able to exactlypin that down, but it's
something and at least itprovides a framework that's akin
to the progressive overload andperiodized physical approach
that you mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:33:48):
And individualized.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
Individualized too.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
yes, I'd love to see these kind of resources be more
widely available, so that thereare there are things that we
could put into the hands ofathletes who aren't at the tip
of the spear yet.
Right, yeah, and help to speedup that learning curve.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
100 all right, this has been fun.
I'm gonna let you go.
All right, man, where can I seeyou again?
I have two final questions foryou.
The second, second one's goingto be harder than the first one.
First off, where can peoplefind more about you and
potentially work with you?

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
So I have a small company that works on these
issues and if people areinterested in learning more
about that, they can go to thewebsite cerebralperformancecom,
or they can email me.
Scott at cerebralperformancecom, I'm happy to field questions,
talk to people.
We could do a free consultation.

(01:34:39):
Check out what I have to offerhere, whether it fits with what
you're trying to do.
I generally work hand in handwith coaches who are writing
training plans.

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
That's not my gig I'll leave a link to the show
notes.
And that, and my second one youneed a book man.
When's the book coming out?
I'm going to keep prodding youto do this.

Speaker 3 (01:35:03):
Yeah, no, it's good.
I thank you for bugging me.
So I'm working hard on theproposal and it's coming
together.
I'm a bit of a fiend havingdone so many years of academic
writing, it's hard for me to letit go out of my hands before I
feel like it's 110%.
But it's getting close and Iwould love to send you a draft
If you're interested in lookingat the proposal.
I'd love your feedback.

Speaker 1 (01:35:19):
I would be honored in any way that I can facilitate
that.
I will gladly donate my timetowards it because once again,
it's a resource that is, I think, sorely needed, and you're a
great kind of well wisdom in thearea, from both the clinical
perspective and a practicalperspective.
So it would be my honor and Ihope a year from now we can
bring you back on and we candiscuss the book and when it's

(01:35:40):
out there in the public andeverything.
Well, and we'll hawk it, we'llabsolutely hawk it performance
from the neck up there you go,the working title all right so
yeah thank you so much forhaving me back.

Speaker 3 (01:35:51):
It's been a lot of fun, absolutely, scott.
Thank you, take care.
Bye.

Speaker 1 (01:36:00):
All right, folks, there you have it.
There you go.
Much thanks to Dr Fry forcoming back on the podcast today
, and also thanks to our CTScoaches for sitting down and
letting us know how they bringsome of these elements to life
when they are actually workingwith real athletes.
I'm going to bring Dr Fry backon the podcast in a few weeks,
so sit tight for that one.

(01:36:20):
It'll be sure to be a banger.
This podcast, as always, isbrought to you ad and
sponsorship free, and that is sowe can keep it real.
If you would like to supportthis podcast, you have two
options.
First off, you can subscribe tomy research newsletter,
research Essentials for UltraRunning.
That's a great way to show yoursupport and also dive deeper

(01:36:41):
into some of the topics that wediscuss throughout the course of
this podcast.
You can also become a CTSathlete.
I know that many of you havesome big, audacious goals coming
up the summer, and our crackCTS coaches are always here to
help you out.
If you'd like to take thatroute and see what our coaches
can do for you, all you have todo is go to train rightcom there
is a link in the by in the shownotes for this particular

(01:37:03):
podcast, or you can hit me up onany social media outlet and I
will steer you in the rightdirection.
All right, folks, that is itfor today and, as always, we
will see you out on the trails.

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