EP. 62: Best of The Endurance Experience Podcast Vol. 6

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The intersection of endurance, sport, health, fitness and light, challenging
conventional ideas and empowering people with the science of self
propelled motion. This is the Endurance Experience podcast hosted by
Tony Ridge.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Welcome to the Endurance Experience podcast. I'm Tony Rich. For
those of you that are unfamiliar with this episode, this
is the best of episode Volume six, and at the
end of each season we do a look back at

(00:41):
the five most downloaded and listen to podcasts of the
season into an updated commentary. So this is a good
sampling of what the Endurance Experience is all about. This
was a great season. Every time I think that we

(01:03):
can't talk the previous season, we do, and it was
very difficult to only review those top most downloaded episodes
because they were all amazing great guests. The focus of

(01:25):
The Endurance Experience is always the science of self propelled motion,
endurance sport, as well as health and fitness, and always
try to target the critical question of what is the
most science and evidence based information out there and bring
on experts that can speak to the best science available.

(01:51):
That has been the goal since season one that listeners
would be able to understand that they could come to
the Nerds Experience podcast and get empirically distilled information that
cuts through the weeds of all of the bad information

(02:13):
that people now find in various corners of the Internet
and social media. I think we accomplished that again this season.
Season seven is currently in production and I intend to
drop the first episode pretty soon. And when I first

(02:37):
started back in twenty nineteen with the podcast, there was
something like a million podcasts out there. Apple was saying
that there was five to six hundred new podcasts every day.
Now there's in excess of four million podcasts out there,
So everyone and their mother has figured out that they

(02:59):
can do their own posts. Albeit your guest is as
good as mine, at what percentage of those are actually
high quality podcasts? I I roll every time I land
on a podcast where it's I am Sam Sneid and
this is my best friend Joe Blow, and we're going

(03:20):
to laugh and giggle through fifty percent of the podcasts
and say nothing of substance. But I intend that the
Endurance Experience will continue to be high quality and have
meaningful conversation, science and evidence based conversation, and try to

(03:44):
come up with new ways to broaden the listener base,
but without straying away from the core concept of the
endurance experience. And fundamentally, the podcast is an excuse for
me to sit down and talk to people that I
really want to talk to as a science centered person.

(04:09):
It gives me that excuse to have those conversations. And
if there is a few people that wish to listen
in and get something out of it, well great, that's
an added benefit as well. All right, let's start in
on my first most downloaded podcast of season six. That
was my episode fifty four Sugar does Not Feed Cancer

(04:33):
with Nicole Andrews. She's a registered dietitian graduated from Washington
State University Bachelor of Science in Food Science in Human
nutrition Dietetics. She has a focus in oncology, and she

(04:54):
wrote a book called Sugar does Not Feed Cancer. It's
a great book, looking at it right over here on
my desk. And she's got another book out called Let's
See How I Can Say It without setting off the
sensors f Cancer. It's a cookbook. So we had a

(05:15):
conversation about the really a myth about sugar feeding cancer.
So take a listen to this clip with Nicole Andrews,
Registered oncology dietitian and author of the book Sugar Does
Not Feed Cancer.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
So I'll break it down to you.

Speaker 4 (05:40):
I mean, it makes sense why people would think that
they don't have a nutrition background or a sciencey background,
you know.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
So this is the deal.

Speaker 4 (05:48):
So cancer cells do not act like healthy cells at all.
They are just not the same thing. Okay, So the
other complicated part about cancer, and also is why you
know you have to get surgery. Hopefully would just be surgery, right,
that's still invasive, but then you wouldn't have to get
other treatments, right.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
But unfortunately a lot of times people will need to get.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
Chemomue therapy, radiation, other therapies to kill off cancer because
it is so complicated that it grows and divides in
spreads at rates that's not like a healthy cell at all.
Researchers are researching cancer all the time to make these
great medicines to target it because these cells just they're
wild in the way. They never slow down, never slow down.
So yes, it's true that cancer cells do uptake more

(06:29):
nutrients faster than healthy cells. The thing is, though, is
they don't stop. And the way that they uptake carbs,
protein and fat and so yes, cancer cells uptake carbs, protein,
and fat, which I guess you could say like the sugar,
so it will uptake more than a healthy cell. So technically, yeah,
cancer cells feed off of all nutrients. The thing that's
important to know, and researchers know that too. They know that,

(06:51):
and we're not trying to hide that or anything. The
thing is, though, you cannot slow down or manipulate cancer
with your diet or with food. Unfortunately, and sadly, if
someone was not eating at all, which I would never want,
and some people will try that. Cancer survivors are told,
you know, oh you have to fast, you have to starve.
You know, the cancer will continue to grow, divide and

(07:12):
spread just at its regular old rate, and the healthy
cells are then affected. Healthy cells don't act like a
cancer cell. They need they need nutrients, and they need
it all the time. And they can't gobble up nutrients
wherever they want like cancer cells. They can create new pathways.
They have like this little environment, this little like bubble
around wherever the cancer is to make sure there's nutrients
on its way coming in before it even needs it.

(07:33):
It's wild. The science is wild. Healthy cells are just
not like that. Well, what happens with cancer survivors and
why it's frustrating about this myth is that they start
cutting out foods thinking that maybe they can, you know,
because someone's told them and they're misinformed that they can
control the cancer's growth or slow it down or whatever
by not eating. But the only thing that happens is
their organs become weak, they become weak, Their healthy cells

(07:54):
can't repair after these treatments.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
They become weak, they become malnourished.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
And so, yes, it's true cancer cells up take nutrients,
but no, it cannot affect it.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
You know, the way that you eat or to take
out foods.

Speaker 4 (08:05):
So let's say you ate a lot of sugar, you
ate tons more, are you going to speed up its growth? No,
it's got its own agenda, it's got its own metabolism set.
It's got all this crazy weird you know, pathways of
everything's researchers can even understand and everything about cancer, they're
still you know, trying to research, Hey, how how does
it do this?

Speaker 3 (08:21):
How does it grow like this?

Speaker 5 (08:23):
You know.

Speaker 4 (08:24):
So that's a frustrating myth because a lot of times people, oh,
you know, what's kind of frustrating for cancer survivors is
it's sort of like, you know, it's it's it's inappropriate
and rude to be like why are you doing chemo?
Like just omit sugar, Like that would be so much easier,
you know, you really could, you.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
Know, I wish it would go easy.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Like that would be uh, that would be amazing.

Speaker 4 (08:45):
You know, just have cancer just wither away with you know,
you just stop eating ice, I mean, come on people.
And then also the other thing about not being able
to you have to remember, like cancer cells on a
Petrie dish. So when you see all these studies come out,
they're like, oh, you can kill cancer really easily or
just put like you know, baking soda, honor. Okay, a
cancer cell in a Petri dish is not going to
be the same as cancer cells wrapped up and all

(09:06):
around the healthy tissue inside the human body, you know,
so whatever you're eating doesn't just go land on the
cancer cell either. So it's just a lot more complex
than people realize. And a lot of cancer survivors get it.
And that's why I titled my book that so they
would be like, oh my gosh, finally someone gets it,
So they would, you know, trust me, to read it
to understand like, hey, what are the facts. So you

(09:27):
just can't control it with food, and that's a big misconception.
And what will improve treatment outcomes the best is being
a very well nourished individual throughout treatment and that comes
from eating more food, more calories in protein. And so
if they have fears around eating, they're not going to
do that and it's going to affect their outcomes. So yeah,
this whole narrative of sugar feed's cancer and starving cancer

(09:48):
is really backwards.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
We want cancer survivors eating very well.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, and if you if you think that you can
you can stop cancer by just not eating sugar, well,
there's a no prize in medicine just waiting for you
if you can prove it empirically. You write your don't
go on TikTok uh, write your paper, you know, hire

(10:11):
your research team, write your paper. There's a million dollar prize,
Nobel Prize for it. You would be the most celebrated
scientists slash doctor in the history of medicine if you
can prove it empirically with period view you know, double blind,
randomized controlled trials and such. Obviously that that hasn't happened

(10:34):
because that's not not true.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah, exactly, way to go, Tony.

Speaker 4 (10:40):
I love it.

Speaker 3 (10:40):
It's just not true. It's true at all.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
One other thing I want to ask you on the
flip side of the sugar thing, was the artificial sweeteners
artificial sweeteners are safe?

Speaker 3 (10:52):
Yes, yes, oh my gosh, yes, there's been a lot.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
So there's always been a lot of talk about you know,
zero coworie sweeteners, artificials, seeners, all of them, you know,
all the different types on the market. So none of
those are increasing cancer risk. None of those cause cancer.
And that's a huge you know, it's a hot topic.
People think it can especially recently there's a lot of
the who updated and reaffirmed the acceptable daily intake of

(11:17):
artificial sweeteners like around aspartain being safe.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
And you know, people wanted to target.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
That as being a reason to causing cancer, and you know,
the science and research is there. It's not increasing risk
of cancer, it's not causing disease. It's not just throwing
your gut for artificial sweeners. They get a pretty bad reputation,
but it is a good way. Like if you like it,
you definitely don't have to have it. No, you don't
have to have it at all totally. But let's say
you want to you know, flavor your foods or your
beverages and have less calories because you want to spend

(11:45):
your calories somewhere else. You know, that's perfectly acceptable. They
don't increase risk of cancer. They are well studied.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
One of the most most studied foods are the artificial sweeteners.

Speaker 4 (11:55):
And yeah, I mean I think if you enjoy them,
just add them in and they do not increase risk
of cancer.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
That is correct, Yeah, excellent. Okay, So let's go into
some prevention topics, and so one of the questions I
want to sort of drill down on is is excess
at opacity or body fatness, and does that increase cancer risk?

(12:23):
And if so, with types of cancers or how many
cancer just to get an idea of the exposure of that.
I know that's a sort of sensitive topic sometimes.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
Oh it's okay, no problem, Yeah, no, of course, you know. Yeah,
absolutely so an excess at a post tissue on the
human body will increase risk of thirteen different cancers. Okay,
so it's not ideal to have an excess level of
at a post tissue. Now, what's important to note is
we are not talking about a specific number on the scale.
We're talking about overall, you know, your body composition, and

(12:57):
so people can I encourage and recommend all the time
ways to move more and eat different to lower their
fat tissue. This is not about a certain size or
a number on the scale. This is about increasing muscle
mass or just reducing at a post tissue as well.
A few different things are happening. So first off, you
know estrogen like hormone sensitive cancers are driven by estrogen,

(13:19):
which does come from your organs, your adrenals, your ovaries,
but also can come from at a post tissue. And
so you know, lowering atipost issue and it doesn't even
have to be the full on you know, whatever that
individual's goals are, if they're one hundred pounds, fifty pounds,
whatever they're you know, just a little bit of weight off,
a little bit of reducing that at a post tissue
is going to help. So unfortunately, one of the things

(13:40):
that's going on is the researchers found and this is
all you can definitely read this all my book, but
you also can read more.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
World Cancer Research Fund.

Speaker 4 (13:49):
They have all the data they use the Continuous Update
Project and talking more through this, But so when there's
an excess of fat tissue in the body, it is
harder for the body to signal around and pair andy
damaged cells, damaged DNA, because that's just a normal part
of being a human as we age or go through life,
our cells and our DNA get damaged every day, injury, sunlight,

(14:10):
you know, aging, whatever, it's just a normal part of
being human. Well, they repair too. Our bodies are pretty cool.
It goes in and repair. And when you eat plant foods,
more plant foods. So I'm not saying you have to
go begin a vegetarian, but when you eat more plant foods,
that will repair that. Well, when you have access atipos
tissue on your body, it interrupts that process.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
It's not as efficient.

Speaker 4 (14:28):
So you know, there are certain things that that high
level of fat tissue are doing.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Certain cancers will.

Speaker 4 (14:34):
You'll have increased risk of if you have atipuose tissue
in certain areas you're for your body, like colon cancer
for example. But I think that the important takeaway is
how can you move your body or get stronger in
a fun way for you not scrutinize your size or
the scale, but like Hey, how can we eat different
or move more that you love that can lower that
adipose tissue? Because yeah, it's true, it will increase risk

(14:56):
of thirteen cancers.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
So what would you consider the top science and evidence
based choices that people can make that can minimize risk.
Exercise or some others that you know of.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Oh yeah, okay.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
So the first I think a good one to point
out is a lot of people kind of what we
talked about is, Okay, are there any foods that are
off limits?

Speaker 3 (15:19):
Are there any foods that are increasing risks? Like soy
is a huge myth.

Speaker 4 (15:21):
For example, I'll always say SOI is increasing risk or
giving you estrogen. You know that's not true at all.
Soy is a plant, it has phytoestrogen.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Eat more soy. We love soy.

Speaker 4 (15:30):
But the two foods that will increase risk at consumption,
at any consumption will be alcohol. It's going to increase
risk of mouth, throat, breasts, liver, coln, and stomach cancers.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Okay, and this includes all types of alcohol.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
The ethanol which is in alcohol is going to increase
risk of those cancers. And then the other one is
processed meats. So those are the two that you if
you're going to omit the process. Meats would be like
Deli needs sausage, bacon, hot dogs, things like that.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Definitely go check out her book Sugar does Not Feed Cancer,
her cookbook f Cancer, and you can go check her
out on Instagram. She is at Oncology dot Nutrition dot RD.
Some comments about that clip, and then really, this topic

(16:21):
in general is number one. Be highly skeptical at anyone
out on the internet talking about cancer, specifically who's not
a doctor or an oncology registered dietitian or a PhD
in cancer biology. You hear people decreeing that they know

(16:45):
better than modern medicine and science, and that you can
stop cancer by starving it or cutting out sugar. Things
like that. These are all examples of misinformation or disinformation,
and really it can be very dangerous when you start
talking about cancer and seducing people down pathways to magical

(17:14):
thinking or the lore of quote unquote natural remedies that
sidestep of the preponderance of empirical scientific evidence. Her book
and her content is very interesting. She talks about a
wide range of nutrition topics and debunks a lot of
things that are commonly misunderstood, like GMOs. People think GMOs

(17:40):
are bad for you know, GMOs are not bad for you.
She has a lot of information about that. Things like organics.
People think, oh, you got to go for organics. You know,
she's written on that note. Organics is just really fancy marketing. Right,
Alkaline diet, alkaline water, Skip those, that's a bunch of nonsense.

(18:04):
And she goes into detail about supplements. Right, only a
very small percentage of people actually needs supplements. If you do,
they should be something prescribed by a doctor. But the
thing about supplements is supplements may have things that you
don't expect that they have in them. And if they

(18:25):
have the things that they have them in the first place,
you may just be doing nothing much but creating very
expensive urine or other things. And when you go over
two hundred percent of the recommended daily allowance, well, that
increases succeptibility to something called free radicals, which can lead

(18:49):
to increased risk of cell damage and other risks. So
called juice cleanses, detoxes, skip those. There's nothing that detox
is your body better than your liver and your kidneys.
Those are built in mechanisms that the body has to

(19:09):
detox itself. You can find all of this information that
I'm talking about and more in Nicole Andrew's book Sugar
Does Not Feed Cancer. She's the oncology dietitian, registered dietitian,
and her Instagram you can check it out, is very good.
She's putting out content regularly. Okay, let's go on to

(19:34):
the next clip. This was episode fifty four with Professor
Andrew Jones. He's a PhD in Applied physiology in the
Department of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter.
He's internationally recognized, and we had a broad conversation about

(19:54):
SuperShoes and the record marathon performances that we've seen from
men and women. With men, we've seen Calvin Kiptum run
a near flat two hour marathon, which is incredible in
twenty twenty three. With women, we've seen just this past

(20:16):
month Ruth keptin Jettit run two nine fifty six, which
is even more incredible, both of those coming in Chicago
within about a year, and the latter coming after Andy
and I had this podcast and this discussion. So in
this clip, Professor Jones is talking about the evidence that

(20:39):
these quote unquote SuperShoes are a contributor to the performance.
What do you know about the performance effect of these
so called super shoes and do you think it's driving
performance or do you think it's something else.

Speaker 6 (20:59):
I think it's a contributory factor. I mean, first of all,
just to marvel at those couple of records that you
alluded to, justing, you know, amazing. I guess I wasn't
surprised that Kipped them ran a world record because the
one his second race, the one that he didn't mention
that he's done three, was in London and he set
the course record in London. Now Kip Chogi has won

(21:21):
that race five times, so for him, you know, on
his second ever marathon, to run faster than Kip Chog
he ever has after five attempts on that course, suggested
that he was going to do something. To be honest,
I didn't expect it would be in Chicago because it's
not notoriously a very fast course. I mean, world records
have been set there in the past, but not for
a while. And I don't know if that's because the

(21:42):
fields have been going to you know, to London and
to New York and to Berlin or what it is.
But apparently it is actually quite a fast course if
you get good conditions, you know it's flat, and they
did have good conditions, so I think everybody was wanting
to go to Chicago now. So it's yeah, so astonishing,
and I don't think it's going to be long. If
he keeps himself fit and healthy, doesn't get injured, that

(22:05):
he'll actually break two hours in one of these major marathons,
which of course was the pursuit when all of this
kind of this stuff kicked off. I think arguably even
more remarkable as the two eleven, because you know, Paula
is two fifteen twenty five. When that was run, well,
I was just stellar. That blew everything out of the water.
So to go, you know, almost four minutes or about

(22:27):
four minutes faster than that is just stunning, isn't it.
I think there's there's no question that the shoes have
made a difference. Obviously, as I mentioned, I was involved
in the break in two project, and that was an
opportunity for Nike to launch what was then the Vapor Fly,
and there have been numerous iterations of that shoe since then,
the one percent, the Alpha Fly, and of course other

(22:49):
manufacturers are on board making their own equivalent or alternative versions.
I think when you do do the modeling of that,
I mean, the original study suggested that the vapor fly
and I think subsequentquently the alpha fly we've done some
work with these shoes as well, improves running economy. So
this is the oxygen cost of running at a given speed.
You know, if you get people to run on a

(23:09):
treadmill for five to ten minutes, you measure their oxygen
costs for that speed. There's a particular level that it
typically is at, and you find that if you switch
them to one of these new super shoes that it
can be four or five percent lower. Now, when you
model that, you know you're not going to get a
four or five percent faster overall marathon time, but you
are going to get one, say, a one percent faster

(23:30):
marathon time or a two percent But when you look
at it in the elites, I think you're probably going
to get somewhere between thirty seconds and maybe ninety seconds.
So one of the interesting things about the shoes that
we know now is that not everybody responds the same.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Way, right and responders high risk.

Speaker 6 (23:48):
Non response, Yeah, you get some negative responder. And also
different people respond differently to different shoes, and nobody can
quite understand why this is. And of course there's a
carbon plate and there's this resilient, super resilient foam and
lots of cushion in still very light weight, and different
combinations of that seem to suit different people with different
fitness and different weights and different running styles somewhat differently.

(24:10):
So it could well be that, you know, some people
are super responders to the super shoes and they're getting
a very big improvement in their performance as a result.
The other bit of this puzzle, though, I think, is that,
as I mentioned, when you measure running economy on a
treadmill in the lab, you typically do it, you know,
sort of five to ten minute running back, and you

(24:31):
do it at a variety of different speeds. But of
course five or ten minutes is only a small fraction
of the time that you'll take to run a marathon.
And what's actually probably even more relevant is how does
it affect your running economy in the last few miles,
not just in the first few miles. And it could
be that those shoes are really making people, you know,
it's preventing damage, it's preventing them losing their efficiency. They

(24:54):
become more fatigue resistant and so they can maintain their
speed for longer, so the effect could be even greater
in the latter stages. And then the other element to
this is that it isn't it isn't just about the
acute effects on race day, which is what I've been
talking about so far. The top runners are training in
these shoes every day as well, because they know they
get in supplied by the sponsor, they don't have to

(25:14):
shell out three hundred dollars a pair each time, and
I think what they're finding is that they just recover
so much better. And as a consequence, they're either running
more miles or they're running those miles faster, so they
probably get into the start line in better shape as well.
So it's a combination. Now all of that is to
do with the shoe. I still think it isn't just

(25:34):
about the shoe. I think essentially the world was inspired
by breaking to you and Kip Chogi and this new
human is limited, you know phrase that he uses so often.
I mean, my job is to find a limit that
clearly everybody has some limitation somewhere, right, But I think
what he demonstrated is that you can everybody can do

(25:54):
a bit better than they first realize. And you know,
all of these other athletes have been chasing him, and
he's just put things into clear blue water, and they're
filling in the gaps now, you know, and will eventually
surpass his achievements. And it's in the same way that
you know, Roger Banister did with the four minute mile
back in the day, which everybody initially thought was impossible,
and you know, if you broke four minutes, you die.

(26:17):
And then the minute he did it, well, within a
few months it was it just became kind of runn
of the mill. Lots of people were doing it, so
it just changes the mindset. Now I kind of feel
a bit weird talking about psychology as a physiologist, but
actually sometimes you just just set the barrier. I think
it's in human nature. You know, if the world record

(26:37):
is say two three oh one, then people aspire to
run two two fifty nine because they just don't believe
that they're physically capable of taking minutes off a record.
I think Kip Chogi changed the mindset and other people
have followed suit on that.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, I remember I had with
the Male Clinic Michael Joyner. He wrote back in the nineties.
I think he modeled back in the nineties of paper
that of the sub to our marathon is within reach
or something to that effect. But that was back in

(27:12):
the nineties, and I think oxygen cost was part of
that oxygen cars running economy. I think there was one
other factor.

Speaker 6 (27:20):
Yeah, vot macs and what he called fractional utilization. So
it's the percentage of your vot max that you can
sustain for our periods. Yeah, those three things, and they
do work really well. You know. So when we were
selecting the athletes for break Into, one of the things
we used was the Joiner model. We measured those variables,
we put it into the equation, and you can predict
what they're theoretically capable of. It tends actually to it

(27:44):
can overestimate what they can do. And that's partly because
what the original model doesn't account for is this drift
in oxygen cost over time, this fatigue that people will experience.
So I've actually recently modified the Joiner model to include
something called resilience, which is all about, you know, to
what extent do these factors actually changed with time? And

(28:06):
you know, people like Kip Chogi, i'd let you into
it's not really a secret, but you know, he was
obviously one of the best athletes that we tested, and
we selected him as one of the guys that we
thought could potentially break too. But his physiological variables weren't
you know, a million times better than everybody else. He
was up there, but he wasn't. His physiology didn't explain

(28:29):
quite you know, how much better he was than he
is than everybody else, And so there was some other factor.
And actually, when you watch him finish some of these races,
and particularly the one fifty nine challenge, he looks like
he hasn't even run, you know, when you see him
sprinting across that finish line. And it was the same
with Kiptom actually in Chicago. Those guys seem to be
super resilient, and I think that's a physiological trait, and

(28:52):
I think it may be supported by the super shoot
as well, as I've already suggested. But there's another dimension
to those really top please. Paul Radcliffe was another one
who was running negative splits back in the day as well.
You know, there aren't many people who are capable of
running close to their personal best for the half marathon
and then getting quicker.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the negative splits. I think maybe
I've done it once. It's incredibly hard to do, but
it's characteristic of these athletes to hold back in the
first half and then go in the second half. So
you're saying that there's an oxygen cost effect with the shoes,
but there's also a recovery element that that is the

(29:34):
contributing factors.

Speaker 6 (29:36):
Yeah, I think two things. First of all, there's an
effect on oxygen cost all the way through, which can
be really quite big in some individuals. We're in the
right shoe. I think it's preventing, you know, because when
we're talking about oxygen cost of running, the oxygen cost
of running in the first miles of a marathon are
very different to what you experience at the end. You know,

(29:57):
as you fatigue and your biomechanics changes, and you're the
type of fuel that you're utilizing, you shift a bit
from carbohydrate towards fat that costs a bit more oxygen.
So you find that your oxygen costs your VEO two
is rising a little bit. You know, gradually with time,
your Voto max isn't going up. If anything, that's coming down,
so you know, you're getting closer and closer to the limit,

(30:18):
and they'll come a point where you simply cannot sustain
that and you slow down. So I think the shoe
is also reducing the extent to which oxygen cost is
drifting in the latter stages of a marathon. But also
it's about the fact that they can recover more rapidly
from hard training sessions. You know, in the past, you
run some of you know, sometimes they go up to

(30:39):
twenty five miles in training over tough terrain, and they
don't hang about. They do like tempo runs, they do
progressive runs where they get faster over twenty or twenty
five miles, And clearly most people are going to be
fatigued from that and it's going to take a little
bit of recovery. They're going to have to have an
easy day, go slow, do it. But actually, you know,
the anecdotally what the athletes are reporting is that they're

(31:01):
not finding it as fatiguing as they once did. They
bounce back, so there's a resilience in training so that
the next day they can get up and they can
train twice and the speed isn't impacted to the extent
that it was in the past, So they're able to
do more miles at higher speeds, and maybe that's just
another stimulus to their training. So as I say, yeah,
the shoe is operating in a number of different ways.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
The full link to that episode is in the show notes,
and all of the episodes are actually in the show notes.
You can go to them. But that was a great
clip where he talked about the evidence for the performance
effect of those shoes, and he talked about the Michael
Joyner model. And I actually had Michael Joyner on the
podcast in twenty nineteen where we touched that subject as well.

(31:46):
Professor Jones and Michael Joyner have moved me closer to
accepting that there is a performance effect for these shoes,
if you remember very early, still very skeptical just because
I haven't seen the empirical evidence the data, but also
and I talked about this with Professor Jones on the podcast.

(32:09):
Back in twenty eleven, guy by the name of Jeffrey
Moutai came into the Boston Marathon and ran a two
three two, and that was when people started to see
athletes go and the male athletes start to go under
two four pretty regularly. This was long before those shoes,

(32:30):
so there are potentially other factors there too. Motivation. Money,
Money's a powerful motivator, and so these were some of
my early skepticisms. Not to mention, if I had a
dime for every manufacturer that made extraordinary claims about their products,
I'd be a very, very rich coach. But I think

(32:52):
some of the data that I've seen thus far has
shown that for the professionals he at leaves, it could
be a you know, a performance effect for the shoes,
like Andrew Jones said, you know, let's say one percent
or a little over one percent performance. However, for me,

(33:12):
and I think Andrew Jones agrees with this, as he
said in the podcast, that doesn't take away at all
from the unbelievable performance of these athletes. And I think
there are some people out there, and I part company
from these people that seek to diminish the performance of
these athletes because they believe that it's not authentic. And

(33:35):
I can help to think that this position is completely
orthogonal to the way that we approach just about every
sport in the history of sport. For example, my episode
fifty two with Mark Allen let me just play a
brief clip from that. So you had steel bikes in

(33:58):
eighties and where they stealed no clipping pedals.

Speaker 7 (34:02):
Well, my very first bike was a road bike with
with toatraps and you know, obviously nothing arrow and some
of the first races that I was in I didn't
even wear a helmet. You didn't need to work. There
was no regulations on helmet. Pretty stupid, right, But anyway.

Speaker 8 (34:20):
By the time I did my final iron Man in
nineteen ninety five, I actually had I had I had
tried a couple carbon fiber bikes that were the very
first ones made, and they were, you know, they were
very very heavy. They didn't have the design quality that
obviously that they have now. And the race the bike

(34:42):
that I final iron Man bike that I had was
actually made of aluminum and it had it had some
aero tubing and so it was kind of like the
very beginning of the of the aerow revolution. You know,
we started using arrow bars in I think it was
nineteen eighty eight or something like that. I think I
started in nineteen eighty eight, But as far as bikes,

(35:05):
it was right around the mid nineties that the aerodynamics
started to come into it, and that went through a
lot of a lot of changes. And you know, if
you look at my position on the bike compared to
the position now, you know, I look like a complete amateur.
But back then my position was as good as.

Speaker 7 (35:24):
Anybody knew how to get it.

Speaker 8 (35:26):
So there's just been that, you know, that progression of knowledge,
and it does make a difference. And so you know,
if you spend fifteen minutes less or twenty minutes less
on the bike, you have so much more energy left
over for the marathon, which is also a thing that
adds into you know, these these dramatic jumps in fitness

(35:46):
or in performance.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
When hearing that statement by Mark Allen, one of the
greatest iron men triathletes ever, on the degree to which
the bike technology changed, I don't think there's anyone that
would suggest that the performance today is a watered down

(36:12):
human performance. In the history of sport, we see innovations,
whether it be a nutrition, whether it be in training
technology or equipment. And of course it's healthy to have
the quote unquote unfair advantage conversation, as we always have

(36:35):
it with any sort of innovation. But athletes are going
to continue to use these innovations and improvements in knowledge
to incrementally enhance their ability to gain performance. So for
those who say that the so called supershues are outing

(37:00):
human performance, that's a bit like saying that the new
super bikes and power meters and arrow helmets and clipless
pedals and superior bike positions, those are all clouding human performance.
I don't think anyone would say that, but I think
this is a big error of some very smart people

(37:24):
out there. I was very surprised that some people are
making this error or have this blind spot. And again,
as Professor Jones alluded to on the podcast, the shoes
don't take away from the spectacular performance of these athletes.

(37:44):
We started to see the performance trend upward prior to
the launch of these so called super shoes. As far
as individual athletes buying these shoes, me personally, I have
not worn these shoes or tried them or ran in them.

(38:07):
I don't recommend that the average age group athlete start
throwing three hundred dollars at these shoes. I spent so
many years as a coach trying to pull athletes back
from silver bullet or perceived silver bullet solutions. Try athletes,

(38:30):
marathon runners, constantly want to either take some supplement or
buy some gadget that turns them into Spider Man. Look,
it's not gonna happen. There are no silver bullets, and
it's far more likely that the average athlete won't even
notice any performance gain that you would get from such

(38:54):
a shoe. All right, let's proceed to the next clip.
My next most downloaded and listened to podcasts of season
six was episode fifty eight. I called this one Adipacity Health,
GLP one, Nutrition and Exercise, and this was with Professor

(39:20):
Tanya Halliday. She's a PhD and also a registered dietitian.
She's the assistant professor in the Department of Health, Kinesiology,
and Recreation at the University of Utah. A Boston native,
I'm not surprised that this podcast did well. People love

(39:43):
the nutrition topics. Professor Halliday and I talked about a
range of nutrition topics obcit rates over the last fifty
sixty years and why they changed so much. The debate
of about ergy, balanced debate, whether a calorie is a calorie,
whether or not she believes that that still holds true,

(40:05):
talked about GLP one medications and weight loss. So it's
very difficult to find one clip to highlight, but listen
to this one on the obesity rate change. So we've
seen a pretty big difference between say last fifty sixty

(40:27):
years and obesity rates. In your opinion or if your research,
why do we see that difference and is this associated
to adverse health outcomes?

Speaker 5 (40:41):
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think you know,
the easy answer that we would all probably jump to
is we're eating more and we're spending less energy. And that's,
you know, at face value, that is true, that is
part of it. But you know, I'm a total nerd,
and so you know, someone or says something, I'm like, well,
we need to find if there's actually data to support that.

(41:04):
And so, like you said, if we were to go
back fifty sixty years and HAINES, which stands for the
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, that's a project that
was actually started in the early nineteen sixties and it
has allowed us to track a variety of health outcomes
in children and adults, you know, including obesity rates, including

(41:27):
you know, dental health.

Speaker 9 (41:28):
It's pretty it's pretty all encompassing.

Speaker 5 (41:31):
And so in that first year that en HAINES was
conducted and basically, this is a cross sectional survey, so
they select randomly different counties across the US that they're
going to sample from, and then they you know, randomly
select individuals from those communities to serve as participants.

Speaker 9 (41:52):
And it's a combination of you.

Speaker 5 (41:55):
Know, surveys about health so tell us you know what
your diet is, as well as directly measuring certain things.
So they'll do a fasting blood draw, they will directly
measure height and weight of people rather than just asking
them to self report. And so this has been going
on for you know, about sixty years now, and so

(42:16):
it is really great because we can track these trends
over time.

Speaker 9 (42:20):
And in that.

Speaker 5 (42:20):
First year, about thirteen percent of the US was classified
US adults rather were classified as having obesity, which has grown.
Our most recent estimates about forty two percent of the
adult population has obesity in this country.

Speaker 9 (42:38):
And of course some people are going to.

Speaker 5 (42:39):
Criticize BMI and say it's it's flawed, but at the
population level, it really does a great job of tracking
at a paucity and this survey and Haines also has
measured waste circumference as well, not not at the start,
it didn't start doing that in the sixties, but I
think just before to the two thousand it started. And

(43:01):
you also see that same trend as well, with increasing
rates of BMI also increasing rates of abdominal obesity as
measured by waste circumference.

Speaker 9 (43:11):
So they're like, okay, well, what caused this?

Speaker 5 (43:14):
And that's where it gets actually a little bit more
challenging because we don't have great ways to definitively measure
physical activity or energy intake over these long periods of time.
Now En Haines certainly asks about this. People do dietary
recalls as part of the Enhines survey, but that's limited

(43:36):
to self report, and we know that people are generally
going to underestimate how much they eat.

Speaker 9 (43:44):
But you know, there is you know, if we were to.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
Look at that data EI, there does seem to be
an increase about one hundred and sixty calories a day
for men and about I think three hundred and so
calories a day for women that.

Speaker 9 (43:56):
We've seen reported over time.

Speaker 5 (44:00):
Another way that we can estimate energy intake is we
look at the US Department of Agriculture, So the USDA,
they publish what's called food availability data, and from that
you can estimate food consumption for the population after accounting
for you know, spoilage and plate waste in other ways,

(44:21):
that food doesn't actually get consumed.

Speaker 9 (44:24):
So if we look at.

Speaker 5 (44:25):
That data, we also see there's probably about a twenty
five percent increase in energy intake.

Speaker 9 (44:32):
I think that data is from like the seventies to
about two.

Speaker 5 (44:35):
Thousand and if we want to get a little bit
more detail from there, they actually report that the types
of food that people or the reason for this energy
increase is one increased portion sizes, which I think is
you know, a no brainer to everyone.

Speaker 9 (44:48):
If you were to look back at what a.

Speaker 5 (44:50):
Happy meal or you know what a you know what
a McDonald You know, basically what we have now is
a happy meal was like the adult meal at McDonald's
when they first came out with it. So definitely portion size. Also,
foods consumed away from home has increased over time. And
then specifically salt, these snacks, pizza, and sodas are like

(45:11):
the three big ones that are increased liquid calories. Yeah,
so those you know, those things all, you know, I
think people will come up with those on their own,
but it's nice that you know, this is born.

Speaker 9 (45:23):
Out in the data. As well.

Speaker 5 (45:25):
So definitely we're eating more and then the other side
of that equation is are we moving less? And it's
also hard there to definitively state because a lot of
the data in and HAINES is going to be self reported,
and just like people are going to underreport their diet,
we know they're going to over report their physical activity.

Speaker 9 (45:45):
And we do have more.

Speaker 5 (45:46):
Objective ways of determining physical activity now, but those have
been added more recently to end HAINES just because that
technology such as accelerometry, which is like a device you
can wear. You know, there's risk ones, there's hip born ones,
there's ones that get attached to your thigh that can
actually more objectively measure physicot toy. They're newer, and so

(46:07):
we just can't compare sixty years ago to today using
those more objective measures. But there was our recent paper
it came out a couple of years ago that actually
tried to figure out, like, okay, over the decades, how
much has our physical activity decreased?

Speaker 9 (46:25):
And they were able to use.

Speaker 5 (46:27):
Body temperature that was reported back from the Industrial Revolution
until modern times, and basically they were able to make
this connection between body temperature to resting metabolic rate to
then physical activity and report that since then we've had

(46:48):
about a thirty minute decrease per day in moderate to
visit vigorous physical activity.

Speaker 9 (46:56):
Yeah, so that's.

Speaker 5 (46:56):
So not only are we eating more, but we are
indeed moving less. And there was a you know, some
of the ways that we're expending energy have changed.

Speaker 9 (47:06):
So it's not that people were out running marathons you know,
sixty one hundred years ago at high levels. It was
just that life took more energy.

Speaker 5 (47:17):
So if you were to look, you know, in the
nineteen sixties, you know, predominantly women are being engaged in
household work for about thirty hours a week, and that's
like legit work, you know, it's like you're actually cleaning things,
like you're actually.

Speaker 9 (47:32):
Baking bread, you know.

Speaker 5 (47:34):
And now not only have we decreased the time that
we're spending doing housework, but everything's much more automated.

Speaker 9 (47:39):
So it's like I'm not really like I'm.

Speaker 5 (47:41):
Not people on vacuuming their own houses, right, like they
put roombah on and room, but does it for them
or you know, they have a cleaning service or you
know whatever it is, so their husband data actually just
showing about you know, a decrease in time spent in
household chores and management activities over time as well, and

(48:02):
just that our jobs. If you go back to the
nineteen sixties, about half of our jobs had some type
of physical activity.

Speaker 9 (48:08):
Requirement to them, and only.

Speaker 5 (48:10):
About twenty percent of jobs today have you know, higher
levels of physical activity they're going to be required. I mean,
most of us are just sitting on our butts most
of the time. And you know, there's just there's only
so many hours in a day. So while there is
some data showing that leisure time physical activity has increased
a little bit over time, it's just simply not enough

(48:31):
to overcome how automated our life has become in terms
of transportation, you know, housework, all of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, and then then phones and tech technology generally, as
you've heard it too. I can summon unlimited amount of
calories right now with my phone, Yes I can. And
that's that's been a significant innovation that has come within
the last decades or so. Phones. You know, the food environment,

(49:04):
A piece of cheese can get a piece of cheesecake
for two thousand.

Speaker 9 (49:07):
Calories, yes, yeah, easily.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
This stuff wasn't just wasn't there fifty sixty years ago,
And they're also.

Speaker 9 (49:15):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 5 (49:15):
So there are other factors too, like you know, like
genetics certainly plays a role, Demographic, socioeconomic factors.

Speaker 9 (49:25):
All contribute to this as well.

Speaker 5 (49:27):
I don't want to say it's not necessarily like people's fault,
because you know, our.

Speaker 9 (49:30):
Environment has changed a lot, and you know, the more we.

Speaker 5 (49:33):
Know now about the genetics of obesity, you know, we
can say, like, Okay, you are susceptible and you're in
a high risk environment, whereas you may have had that
same susceptibility fifty sixty years ago, but you were in
an environment that didn't kind of pull the trigger.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah on it exactly. And I can speak to that
personal you know, I grew up, as you know, Dorchester,
which is an inner city, and the social determinants of
health people who have economic who are brought up in
economically disadvantaged areas, they have more difficulty getting healthy food. Hey,
healthy food.

Speaker 9 (50:12):
Expensive absolutely, yeah it is.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
Yeah, yeah, so that and then the propensity for cigarette
smoking and higher stress levels. Yeah, so all of it
plays plays in into it. So you know, I'll ask
you the question that seems axiomatic. But what is there
evidence of adverse health outcomes to excess at apacity or

(50:35):
clinical obesity. I think every every time I turn around,
there's a new debate about this. Where do you fall?

Speaker 5 (50:45):
Yeah, there is you know, a new maybe it's not that.
There is you know, a push for you know, body
positivity and anti diet focused healthcare providers, and I definitely
think there is a place for that, and you know,
making sure because you know, stigma tizing people about their weight,

(51:06):
like is clearly bad and.

Speaker 9 (51:07):
Clearly leads to port health outcomes.

Speaker 5 (51:09):
And so we definitely do need to have much moral
awareness of you know, the biases that we all hold
towards people who are in larger bodies, particularly as healthcare providers.
But I do you know, it is like the evidence,
in my opinion is is overwhelming that access out opacity
is linked to the development of many you know, poor

(51:30):
health outcomes. And so if we were to go, for instance,
looking at the rates of like type two diabetes, those
have increased over time in relation to the increase in
obesity levels. And you know, some people might say, like, wow,
that's due to other non weight specific factors. But if
we go back to say that en Haines data set,

(51:52):
it is the increase in diabetes is not increasing in
prevalence in the non obese populace.

Speaker 9 (52:01):
It's only increasing in.

Speaker 5 (52:04):
Proportion to the amount of people who we've increased in
atopoc or have that central ad apaucity. And you know,
if we already go beyond you know, these population estimates
which are great for tracking trends, but like they don't
tell us much about mechanisms. There have been a plethora
of you know, animal research as well as human you know,

(52:24):
smaller scale clinical trials that really can track the increase
in weight to say, an increase in insulin resistance, which
we know is a precursor to development of diabetes. And
so in my opinion, you know, I think it's very
very clear and similar evidence is going to exist for
other chronic conditions as well that are linked to obesity.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
Link in the show notes to the full episode with
Professor Halliday. And so when we retrace all of the
major questions that we have in nutrition, I think we
keep coming back to some of the same ones. It's
this one, the obesity question, and why we see such

(53:13):
a big difference between obesity rates in the last sixty
years when the human genome is the same human genome
that the human genome hasn't changed in sixty years. We
have the same genes, but yet we see such big
changes in the obesity rates. And when we retread the

(53:37):
best science available, as you learn from doctor Halliday, it's
generally speaking, and we can get into the detail as
doctor Halladay did, generally speaking, though we are consuming more
and we're moving less. Now why are we consuming more?

(53:57):
Is it the food environment? Is it increase access to
summon more calories at any given point in time? As
they say in science, everything is multifactorial, right, so how
much weight do you put on each factor? And this

(54:18):
is really where you dive into the details. And fortunately
we have people like Professor Holliday who has their finger
on the pulse of all of this to provide us
with the latest research in the latest publications and where
it's pointing. The geneticist Francis Collins once remarked, genetics loads

(54:42):
the gun and environment pulls to trigger. And that is
to say that someone could have had the same genetic
predisposition sixty years ago, but because the environment was different
than we didn't see the level of obesity rates that
we see now, and it may be an uncomfortable truth,

(55:07):
but we don't run from facts just because they're uncomfortable.
But as you heard from Professor Holiday, prolonged clinically diagnosed
obesity is associated with adverse health outcomes. When we retread

(55:29):
at the ground on whether or not a calorie is
a calorie, I think, based upon my summation of the
conversation from Professor Halliday's remarks, is that broadly speaking, as
it relates to weight loss, a calorie is still a calorie.
The calorie content of the consumption is the primary determinant

(55:52):
of weight loss versus how one varies the specific types
of macro nutrients. The quality of the consumption is a
completely separate and different question. But for weight loss, a
calorie is a calorie. So all those diets that seek
to focus solely on one specific macro nutrient Paleo, keto,

(56:17):
u atkin, so on and so forth, those are just
very different and extreme ways, sometimes extreme ways of getting
too a caloric deficit doesn't mean something like that couldn't work.

(56:39):
But the question really people should be considering is whether
or not such a diet is sustainable for them or not.
So go back and listen to that full episode if
you have it already, you might find Professor Halliday's synopsis
of the GLP one medications and how they work or

(57:02):
based upon the latest information, how we think they work.
And she gives some information on the benefits of exercise.
So onto the next clip. The next most downloaded podcast
of season six was my episode fifty nine AI and

(57:26):
the Future of Training and Coaching with Dirk Freil. You
may recall that Dirk is the co founder of Training Peaks,
a web based training and coaching software company. Many of
US coaches have been using training Peaks to training coach
athletes for decades, and his father, Joe Friel, who is

(57:55):
also a famous coach, co founded training Peaks with him.
Joe Friel was the author of the Triathletes Training Bible,
the Cyclist Training Bible. And so I have a conversation
with Dirk about several topics, one of them being the

(58:18):
impact of AI on the training and coaching business. Here's
a clip. How is training Peaks going to keep up
with the march of AI? And of course you know
competitors will will come out with their their versions. So

(58:44):
how is training Peaks going to keep pace.

Speaker 10 (58:48):
Yeah, obviously it's already out there. It's a it's a
strange time. We're certainly not at a tipping point yet,
however it might sound, there's somewhat of a bubble, if
you will, going on a lot of hype around it.
But from day one until today, we really look at

(59:12):
what are the best doing, how are they doing it,
and how can we probably bring that to the masses,
but in a very sound, methodical, authentic way. So unfortunately
the AI talk today, unfortunately it's sort of like a

(59:35):
race to the bottom. So it's like promise the world
for fifteen dollars a month and literally like, you know,
this is the best thing going. For fifteen dollars a month,
you don't need a coach. And that is not the case.
I think if you look at again all these athletes
that are going to perish for the Olympics, they're not

(59:56):
relying on AI to tell them what to do tomorrow.
That's just not there. The Tour de France writers are
not relying on AI to decide what to do tomorrow
to prepare for the Tour de Fronts. It's not ready,
it's not there. But having said all that, AI is
here to stay and it's only going to get better. Okay,

(01:00:17):
let's talk. Let's put aside all the bad negative stuff
about AI. Let's just talk about, you know, the positive stuff.
It's actually going to be a game changer and it
is here to stay, and it will affect you know,
endurance athletes and eventually, like all endurance athletes that want

(01:00:37):
to podium will be leveraging some aspect of AI. Right,
But I believe in in the Training Peaks world, we're,
as always with every single thing we've done, we kind
of start through the coaches view, and so what where
can AI help a coach be faster, make a better

(01:00:58):
decision in the moment, And so that's where it's going
to start. We're investigating that. But it's not like prime
time reay or anything, but that's certainly where we will start.
I believe right now, by giving an open ended chat
bought two athletes is somewhat disingenuous because by definition, the

(01:01:23):
athlete doesn't even know the proper question to ask. So
if they start asking the wrong question, they go down
the wrong rabbit hole and they become to some conclusion
that really has nothing to do with like what they're
looking to solve There's a million different ways to solve
the same problem, right, and each individual is unique. So ideally,

(01:01:50):
if you have, you know, five athletes training for the
same event, they all weigh the same, they're all the
same age, they're all females, you're still going to train
them differently. In the ideal world, they will be trained
differently for that same event because they come to the
table with a unique set of parameters physiology, mental state, nutrition, sleep, activity,

(01:02:14):
stress at home, stress at work. Like, that's where we start.
So how do we solve for that solution? And AI
will come in and play a part. It's not ready
right now for that, but it's going to help coaches
for sure in terms of analysis and coming to better
conclusions quicker at the individual level. I also don't believe

(01:02:38):
in one coaching methodology. Even though my father wrote the
Cyclist Training Bible, Traveley's Training Bible, et cetera. He has
his methodology, but that is not the methodology for all
of our coaches. And you might have thirty thousand plus
different coaching methodologies, all practice within training pukes. So how
is one AI solution going to fit into the those

(01:03:00):
different methodologies? You know, one coach believes in a high
fat diet, one coach believes in a high protein diet,
and other believes in a high carb diet, and right,
et cetera. There's so many variations not only just in diet,
but in training and how you adapt the training to
the athlete. And then obviously each athlete has a different

(01:03:21):
profile of recovery, which AI will come and play a
part in. But right now you can really get a
sense of how well in athletes recovering through post workout comments,
through phone calls, through through having coffee with them, seeing
a zoom conversation with them, and how they how they look,
you know, and just their mood comes through. And the

(01:03:45):
other part of it is motivation. You know, there's some
level of motivation you can gain from AI. But if
you finish a workout and your human coach says, hey,
great job at that third interval. You went out way
too hard. Let's the work on that next week, but hey,
great job on today's workout. Like you're going to get
this inner kind of fuzzy feel that's really good and

(01:04:08):
motivating to help you improve, versus maybe the very same
message from AI, but you just know it's not a
human on the other end, and you can't really have
that human interaction in human contact that's very, very different
in terms of it might push the athlete farther on
race day knowing there's an actual human on the other

(01:04:31):
end that's helping them along in that journey, which is
so much more powerful than an AI bought. Yeah, so
I don't believe human coaching will go away, but I
believe AI will help the human coach do a better
job of coaching an individual.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
And using training peaks for at least as long as
I've been doing in endurance sports, and that's been about
twe years, and as a coach, I've seen it evolve
over the years. So it was full circle to finally
sit down and have a conversation with Dirk Friel. And

(01:05:15):
the question of AI is important because I think many
of us are looking at AI as something that will
be very helpful, but we're also looking at it with caution,
saying how much of this is going to actually replace us?
And like you heard from Dirk, I think most people

(01:05:40):
take the position or hope that AI is not going
to completely replace a coach, but it will assist the
best coaches in their training and coaching of athletes, and

(01:06:05):
maybe the bad coaches might get replaced, but the good
coaches will remain, will find new ways of adding value
for athletes, and those are going to be the humanistic touches,
things like athlete psychology and helping with the motivation, and

(01:06:32):
I think Dirk alluded to a few of them. Really
they sit down conversations that you have, the putting of
heads together to try to figure out the strategy. These
are the things that it's very difficult for a chatbot
to replace. I have to admit that there is quite

(01:06:54):
a bit that as the technology improves, there's quite a
bit that will eventually outpace humans. Right, So all of
your information now is being captured via some wearable technology
that is taking in various points of data on a

(01:07:16):
daily basis. The more information it takes in, the more
you feed machine learning algorithms, and pretty soon a computer
and AI technology will be able to assess the training loads,
the stresses on the body, the cycle of training, overload, recovery, adaptation,

(01:07:44):
and be able to quantitatively come up with programs that
an athlete would be able to follow and build them
dynamically better than a human mind can. That's not out
of the possibility. And if you recall, I think I

(01:08:08):
mentioned on the podcast with Dirk that I saw a
lot of this over the last you know, to say,
you know, ten to twelve years, as all the stuff
that I was developing by hand, increasingly I didn't have
to do it anymore because systems and technologies got better

(01:08:31):
and better. Training picks got better and better every year,
Garmin gets better and better every year. Now your watch
is giving you pretty good results on things like power
zones and intensity zones, race time prediction, and pacing prediction

(01:08:55):
based upon accumulated training load. It tells you after a
word out how long it's going to take to recover.
I mean, these are just small examples of machine learning algorithms,
and they're only going to improve the question that I
would pose to coaches, for any coach that would listen

(01:09:18):
to that podcast, what are you doing to add value
to the athlete? Because I've seen this coming a long
time ago. I remember the days when, well it wasn't
too long ago, it's probably maybe a decade ago, where
coaches were really charging big fees for athletes, monthly fees,

(01:09:48):
and they were getting them. Well, guess what coaches are
not able to charge the same fees that they were
in the past. And my informed speculation is that it's
because athletes have many more substitutes now in the form

(01:10:10):
of technology. They are more ways that they can get
good information on what to do, how to do it.
They don't completely replace a human coach. So what it means,
as I said, that coaches need to find new ways

(01:10:34):
to add value sitting down with the athlete and talking
through their training cycle and doing a retrospective and the
human connection hearing from them about what went well and
what didn't go well over the training cycle, pre race

(01:10:57):
analysis and plan, sitting down and talking through a pre
race execution strategy, post race analysis. Right, So, athletes oftentime
will come back from a race and they just want

(01:11:18):
to start typing out a race report and put it
out online. Okay, Well, sit down with the athlete, do
a post race analysis. What went well, what didn't go well?
What did you learn? Analyze the data with them, tell
them what the data means. Don't just stare at the graphs.

(01:11:42):
Try to draw logical conclusions from cause to effect on
the performance. How can you improve going forward?

Speaker 5 (01:11:50):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
And I think these are the ways that coaches can
add value to athletes and if they do them well,
you may make yourself less replaceable. All right. The final
clip and it was the final podcast of season six,

(01:12:18):
which was my season finale, A conversation with Professor Carrie mcgally.
This was episode sixty one, which I titled The Female Athlete, Fairness,
Inclusion and Performance. Professor mcgauley is a sport scientist with

(01:12:42):
Mid Sweden University. She has a broad research agenda in
the female athlete and menstruation effects on training as well
as performance of the female athlete, and so we touched
on quite a number of topics. We talk about a

(01:13:04):
paper that she co authored with some other scientists and
unpacks the evidence and critique of the IOC's twenty twenty
one framework aimed at providing governing bodies with guidelines for
fairness and inclusion, and this really touched on the recent

(01:13:29):
debate over DSD athletes as well as trans women competing
in the women's category. This has been a widely debated
topic in the public sphere as of late, and as
you know that there was widespread conversation in the Olympics

(01:13:49):
about the boxers that really drove some of the debate
into a new stratosphere. The various governing bodies have been
coalescing on what they're going to do and come up

(01:14:11):
with their new frameworks. Many of them have decided to zig,
while the IOC zags and really have part company with
the IOC. I'm referring to World Aquatics, World Athletics, and

(01:14:31):
the UCI they govern International swimming, International Track and Field,
and International cycling. And that's just a few of them.
Others have come up with varying degrees of ways to
deal with the question. But on this podcast we talk

(01:14:54):
about that, and Professor mcgaully and I have an exchange
about what I call the Phelps principle or the Phelps postulate,
which is you will often hear this when we have
conversations about unfair advantage, and that basically says, how come
we don't care about the advantages of Michael Phelps or

(01:15:21):
someone like Michael Phelps in sport. Here's our exchange on that. So,
how would you answer that question as a sports scientist
about all athletes have some sort of advantages?

Speaker 11 (01:15:36):
Well, I think that's easy to be honest, but obviously
not everyone kind of sees it. I mean competitive sport
and you know, you obviously know I already assume it
kind of the answer to this, but wanting to kind
of make it clear for everyone listening who just won't
necessarily have thought through these things. And that's fine, but

(01:15:56):
competitive sport by definition aims to seek how the talented
and the most talented are, you know, a combination of
those physical attributes like you've just said with you know,
phelps owing along to also and huge hands and the
rest of it. Large feet. So there's physical kind of
characteristics that you might be lucky enough to have, but

(01:16:18):
it's not every individual who's got the best physique or
the best physiological characteristics that's going to win that many
gold medals. You also need to have the mental capacity.
You need to have tactics, you need to have technical abilities,
you need to be coachable, you need to be dedicated

(01:16:38):
and committed, you need to have support. You know, there's
so many there's so many things that we know successful
athletes are required to have. But that's the whole point
of you know, that's what we love about sport. That's
what we love about competitive sport. Elites bought the Olympics,
the World Championships. We want to see that Usain Bolt,
or that Michael Phelps or that Katie Lulecki, And that's

(01:17:01):
what it's all about. But what we always like make
is a robustal is the you know, we call this
a straw man argument. So you can't just take one
example and say, oh, just because but that person's like
got these special talents, So why aren't we Why aren't
we handicapping them? Why aren't we giving everybody else a

(01:17:22):
head start against Michael Phelps? No, because within his category,
and he's in a category of biological advantage. And that's
the whole point of having male and female categories, because
we know that men, if you take that Bell curve
of all men on the planet age, let's say eighteen

(01:17:44):
to forty, they're going to perform better than all women
on the planet. And that Bell curve is going to
be a long way to the right. And that's the
whole point of it. And that's exactly the same as
you know, we often use the analogy of having age groups.
You know, a twenty five year old man is not
going to race one hundred meters against an eight or
eight year old boy. We have to have age categories

(01:18:07):
because there's a systematic advantage with age that you know
reaches a point where we peak and then we get
worse as we get older. So when you introduce me
at the beginning being somewhat successful, like that's happened as
I've got older, I haven't got worse. Other people have
got worse more quickly. I've continued to get better. But
like I'm a master's athlete, and I'm a good master's athlete,

(01:18:30):
but I couldn't beat the best senior elite female to
athletes in the world. I don't think I could. But
the point is is that you know, as you get older,
you go into age groups, you have master categories. You
can carry on competing in that specified and protected category.
So being a woman and being a female athlete is
a protected category. So that's why you know, there's no

(01:18:53):
point to single out at Usain Bolt or a Michael
Phelps or anybody else that stand out, because that's what
sport is trying to identify. And the same wait for
we talk. We often use the analogy as one of
weight categories in combat sports for example, or rubbing.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
Yeah. So, and when I hear that argument above Phelps,
it's it's sort of grates like singer nails down on blackboard.
Because across all of sport we have sex for medically
defined or bi biologically defined sex impairments, pair of athletes,
impaired athletes, weight categories, lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight, and then and

(01:19:33):
then like you mentioned age, And that's really it, and
that makes sense because in sport you have to have
the minimum number of categories. If you had a category
for every attribute, right, people with big feet, people with
long arms, height, you know, people who live altitude.

Speaker 11 (01:19:57):
I have no problem to say that my breast size
is like for f I mean, that's hugely disadvantageous, like
in a sport where I have to run at the end,
you know what I mean. So you like you come
up with all of these wild categories to make yourself
a winner.

Speaker 2 (01:20:14):
Yeah. We we create categories when we only when we
need to and we want we want to find Michael Phelps,
Katie Ladecki, Shaquille O'Neil, Spudweb. You know, so not surprising
at all of this podcast was widely listened to over

(01:20:34):
the last month or so. I actually think that this
is an interesting scientific question and a prime use case
for sports science, which is a science just like any
other science. And you know, some people would disagree with me.
They may say something like, why do we need scientific
studies for something like this? Shouldn't the answer be palpably evident?

(01:20:58):
And I say, look, that's what it is all about.
Regardless of how convinced you are about a position, we
should be able to study it and evaluate it and
present the empirical evidence. I highly recommend the paper that
Professor McCauley co authored with several other scientists, and that

(01:21:21):
link is in the show notes of the full podcast.
The paper, in pretty orderly fashion, goes through all of
the evidence, step by step, the differences in development as
a result of androgens through puberty and how that makes

(01:21:42):
a difference in the development of bodies, and all of
the information with regard to the differences in advantages and
whether or not any form of hormone replacement therapies can

(01:22:03):
remove said advantages. That's all in there. There's a pretty
thorough explanation about protected categories and why we have protected
categories in sport, and they also provide some recommendations in
light of the IOC's framework that came out in twenty

(01:22:24):
twenty one. But I wanted to follow up on this
sort of Michael Phelps postulate, because this is probably the
most common retort that we heard over there, really over
the every time this question comes up about the protected

(01:22:44):
women's category and whether it be DSD athletes or trans athletes.
Why don't we only care about unfair advantage in certain circumstances,
but we don't care about Michael Phelps and his big
hands and his long arms and his big feet and
so on and so forth. And I'm not being hyperbolic.

(01:23:09):
This really demonstrates a lack of knowledge of sport and
how sport works. First thing, Michael Phelps, when you compare
him to his peers, he's not an outlier when you
compare him with his peers. In the same way Shaquille

(01:23:30):
O'Neil is not an outlier when you compare him with
the centers of the NBA and an NFL alignment who's
six ' five three four hundred pounds on average. They
are not outliers when you compare them with other NFL lignmen.
So when you compare them with their peer groups, they
are not outliers. And the one retort that people are

(01:23:57):
systematically propagate Mychael Phelps produces fifty percent less lactic acid
than his peers. That's a myth that's never been substantiated
by science, and that's never been substantiated by Michael Phelps
or his coach, Bob Bowman. And Michael Phelps has two
books out. I read both of them. Neither one of

(01:24:20):
them have anything in there about a genetic lactic acid advantage,
so that's not true. I think people are circulating articles
by journalists speculating about Michael Phelps and that he must
be a genetic freak. And even Michael Phelps said that
a lot of that got blown out of proportion, things

(01:24:42):
like he eats twelve thousand calories a day and things
like that, which is not true and it couldn't be possible.
But I think people use Michael fels because he is
He's an example of performance. And Michael Felps submitted in
his book that he he did actually receive quite a

(01:25:02):
bit of suspicion and skepticism for performance enhancing substances. He's
never failed a test, but he did receive quite a
bit of skepticism and scrutiny from reporters saying that his
performance was too good to be true, and how he
was one of the most tested athletes ever as a

(01:25:25):
result of that skepticism, and he never failed doping test
and so on. And one final thing about Phelps, which
is an interesting point in his career as a high
performance world class swimmer, he garnered twenty nine individual world records.
Every single one of those world records are now beaten

(01:25:50):
by somewhere between five and a half dozen men. That
just tells you something right there. Right, So, regardless of
the performance that people think is from a genetic freak,
he couldn't be that much of a genetic freak if
all of his world records are broken. But this is

(01:26:10):
all beside the point. Even if I were to bend
over backwards and grant the physical outlier postulate, it would
be fair game. Because in sport there's only less than
a handful of ways in which we define fairness. I
talk about this in the podcast sex medically defined or
bidologically defined, sex impairments, impaired athletes, athletes with physical impairments, weight, lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight,

(01:26:41):
and combat sports, and then we have age. So across
all of sport, those are the only ways that we
define fairness, and that's why we have categories and protect
the categories for those things only, And you couldn't make
a a category. You couldn't define fairness for every single
attribute out there. A category for athletes with big feet,

(01:27:05):
a category for tall athletes, a category for athletes born
at altitude, a category for athletes that could afford a coach.
So all of this would overly constrain a system, and
anytime you have an overly constrained system, it wouldn't work.
It would completely render sport useless and uneventful. So we

(01:27:30):
only have categories, and we only define fairness in a
very small number of ways, and those small number of
ways represent the biggest differentiators of performance within humans that's
on a peer group relative basis. To wrap this one up,

(01:27:51):
I think we should realize that, look, politics and ideology
should be less out of sport, right. Sport is the
end product of one hundred years of sport and sports science,
and it's gotten along this far by not interweaving things

(01:28:17):
like politics into sports. So I think we will eventually
circle back to this central tenant and we'll just have
to look at this issue closely and see what's going
to happen with some of the governing bodies that have

(01:28:37):
yet to formulate their rules and requirements and how they're
going to accommodate certain athletes insofar as they may exist,
and we'll have to go from there. Okay, just like that,
I am at the end of my best of episode

(01:28:58):
volume six. Wow. So this was a great season. I'm
looking forward to getting season seven up and running for
you guys. If you have any suggestions or feedback, definitely

(01:29:18):
send them to me. I'm at contact at event Horizon
dot tv. Love to hear from you. You have a
favorite episode, one that you liked, one that you didn't like,
conversations that you would want to hear, let me know.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
Follow event Horizon Endurance Sport on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
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our Endurance Institute All over, complete archive of podcasts long
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Speaker 3 (01:29:58):
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