Training Essentials for Ultrarunning 2nd Edition | Koopcast Episode 107

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to a very special episode of the KoopCast an episode that i have wanted to get off the ground for many many many months now and that is the launch of training essentials for ultra running the second edition i i am absolutely thrilled that this book and this product have finally come to light it has been a long time coming i know a lot of the listeners have been consistently reaching out to me asking when is this going to be available and i'm not going to lie the last 10 of getting this getting this book actually out into the public's arms and ears and eyes has been painstakingly difficult you guys know that i don't accept any sponsors or advertisements on this podcast but that is not going to prevent me from plugging my own stuff i feel that i've earned it i'm really proud of the product that's out there and so i wanted to get on the podcast today the co-authors of this book jim rutberg who's a very long time friend and colleague of mine and truth be told he is the one that is responsible for this book and this whole mess in the first place and a new co-author of the book one of my coaching

colleagues corinne malcolm i wanted to get them on the podcast to really describe how the book really unfolded from a content perspective and what you all the listeners can expect if you do happen to go and buy it the book is available now it's available via paperback on amazon it's available in an audiobook format an enhanced audiobook format that we talk about during the course of this podcast uh via audible and it is also available on my website jasoncoop.com backslash book or forward slash book in a special edition hardcover that is only going to be available on my website you're not going to be able to find it on amazon or anywhere else like that and i will personalize those copies for you if you want that to be part of your information arsenal coming up for this next season um i had a revelation just a couple of days ago when i was proofing the book that i really i finally have come around to the understanding that this could be a title that sticks around for 20 or 30 years it really could be something that we see future iterations of and i don't say that very lightly um i've always said that i'm a very reluctant author i'm not a writer by trade and i think something that comes out through the course of this podcast is that i it took a lot of cajoling for me to actually take the leap of faith and write a book and even after the first edition of the book i realized that i wanted to make

a vast number of improvements and adjustments the content and i was able to do that on this particular um this particular edition of the book and i'm quite happy with it and i once again i really didn't realize how impactful it could be for all the trail and ultra runners out there and all the trail and ultra runners that come to enter the space in the next few years until i started uh going through the proofs so i hope the listeners you guys go and check the book out in an effort of full disclosure we recorded this podcast and i'm kind of laughing because of how old it is we recorded this podcast just after all the production for the book and the audiobook were done so we made references to things that happened in the middle of the summer and it's just taken me this long to finally get the thing out in the public so that's the reason for a little bit of the delay there but the book's out people go and check it out i'm very appreciative of all the support that i've received from everybody throughout the course of the years and throughout the course of producing this actual book here it is the preview of training essentials for ultra running second edition with the co-authors of the book jim rotberg and corinne malcolm no one no one has uh written a book like this to make money okay let's start out with that ready so okay go back to the genesis of all of all of this way way before i actually even do corinne right

so um i've i've mentioned multiple times and it's actually in the audiobook now that i'm thinking about it um in the introduction that i was a kind of a really reluctant author part part of that reluctancy is the fact that i'm not a writer some of that reluctancy is i didn't feel that i was an expert some of that reluctancy has to do with just my own internal insecurities and things like that and that's neither here nor there but the more the more salient point to what we just mentioned is is i knew the space wasn't that big and i remember very distinctly going to velo press who was the publisher for the first book who we we've worked with on a number of publications before who was on board with the project you got them on board before you got me on board i think ruddy um i had to get you at least interested i wasn't going to go to them with something that i knew that i couldn't deliver um but i it was a little bit of playing the two off of you it's like i'm like hey i've got jason interested and here's what we want to do and then i had to come to you and you're like hey velo press is kind of interested in this and get you interested in it as well so i was kind of playing both sides well i guess my point with that is is i remember going to velo press and like first thinking you're really going to support this because they got to make money like you know they're you know they need to be a profitable company they're not doing that at a charity i remember going to them and going here's the size of the audience i had the stats right the audience at the

time was like 100 000 140 000 people or something like that you know what fraction of people you could probably sell to run the math does it work out and they were like yeah we can we can make this work and i was flabbergasted at how easy they came to that answer i'm like you're telling me if i just if you sell this many copies it's profitable for you to put to put all of this horsepower behind producing a book they have to find editors and illustrators and copy editors and pay me and blah blah blah blah blah blah and then they pulled like the ace out of the you know the ace out of the deck of cards they said well you know industry-wide 80 percent of authors don't make anything more than their advance meaning they pay you the advance and 80 percent of the authors out there that's all they get they don't see one dime of the royalty but that's my dog squeaky toy by the way for those of you that are wondering they're listening yeah we'll continue to happen but throughout this podcast because this is going to be a loosey-goosey one but but my point with that is is 80 percent of the authors don't make don't make more than royalties back but across all of the books that we had produced at the time and including trading essentials for ultra running number one which ruddy you had a hand in every single one they all have made more than their way more than just their advance back and i haven't but but that was by by design i uh people used to ask me all the time like aren't you making royalties

off the books you wrote with uh chris and jason and at the time i was a full-time employee yeah so i always looked at and said look i would much rather make my salary than rely on royalties that may or may not ever appear so from publishing ultra running trading books yeah it's like the smallest niche of all like i'll take my paycheck every two weeks thank you um and i still agree that that was the right thing to do yeah it's great that the books have done well enough that they've uh that we've seen some royalties from them but um that as i've said to jason and other people in this space who wanted to write books within uh endurance sports and things like that nobody in this space is doing it for the money um you have to be there needs to be a different reason to write the book and i think everyone's agreed with me in terms of understanding that the my thing with books has always been it is a great opportunity to present a subject matter in its entirety so you can cover it from a to z in one big idea and get it into somebody's hands so that they can can digest it from a to z as opposed to you know we've all written articles and done you know smaller bits and pieces the the book is what gives you the ability to um to really give people everything at once well and one of the things that i that i kind of continue to like fall back on in this whole proposition because you're right

nobody's gonna become a zillionaire writing a book corinne i know this is like this was like your first foray into it i think i was very obvious from the get-go that we're not gonna you know retire off into the sunset after after this is published we'll do okay we'll do okay don't don't have all the confidence in the world that that's going to be the case but we're this is not going to be you know retirement money nobody's going to be buying a yacht or anything like that and you were cool with that corinne you were cool with coming on board with the project knowing that you're not going to be a millionaire afterwards i agreed to it despite despite the the uh the hazardous work conditions that is book writing so let's let's add to the complexity thing because i want to tell the whole story of how it came to be in its current format so when i when i produced the first edition of the book with velopress once again they're a company they got to make money and i wanted to do all this cool shit like of course like i'm gonna dive into it and like any ultra runners mindset i'm gonna dive into it full force like with reckless abandon and train 200 miles a week and the same whatever book equivalent there is there um and they said no no no no no no hold on you can't have all of these technical editors and do an audio book and it can only be 350 pages because nobody's gonna buy a 500 page you know training manual right out of the get-go they put some parameters on my enthusiasm you know certainly and i'm very grateful that they did because the first edition would have never

come out with without those parameters it gave me some framework to work with but when we started working with them this next time around we approached them again and i was still shocked we want to do a second edition and velopress which is now pocket outdoor media said yes the first edition did very well it's time for a refresh we got them on board with it it still befuddles me as to you know how something like this can exist in the space about halfway through writing the second edition writing and rising the second edition of the book covet hit and ruddy remembers this very very distinctly um they sent an email out to all of their authors and said we are not going to support any productions that are not completed that are not currently completed so if you'd already written it that didn't apply to those authors but we're not going to support any new productions that have not been completed until at the earliest the end of 2021 and this was march 2020 when they sent this out and i looked at this and i was like oh i cannot i just can't wait this long to put this out with no guarantee that it would actually get put out because you never know what's going to happen they could go under like so many things could happen between now and then and so i made the decision right then and there that i was going to acquire the rights to the book and so i contacted them i said hey listen i want to require acquire the rights to the book they were very gracious and negotiating that deal i worked with ruddy to to

kind of get that but then it became its own monster because i had no restrictions i could do whatever i wanted to i could do whatever i wanted to part of that was bringing you on board in a bigger capacity corinne which they were on board from from from the get-go but i could i had a little bit more leeway with it part of it was actually recording an audiobook i'm gonna play i'm gonna play a little sample of that in the middle of this podcast at a poignant part it's not your part corinne it's another part you're extremely scared um and then part of it was making the book just bigger having more content to it and i feel that now we've all kind of three seen it now it's almost too much ruddy's laughing his ass off is it too much monster is it too much ruddy i don't know that it's too much i can't change it yeah but we can't go back we've created a monster but again if you go back to the very beginning and the purpose or the or the rationale for doing in the first place was we wanted to produce or we saw the opportunity to produce a benchmark book within ultra the ultra running space and the three of us we've all been around coaching long enough to know that there are benchmark books in other endurance sports and in other strength sports and everything else um we had the unique opportunity because of the of ultra running's development that there really wasn't a

benchmark book out there and it's pretty rare that you have the opportunity anymore pretty rare that you have the opportunity to create something like that that wasn't there so um you know the first one was a complete work i believe and um this one is an expanded one not because we just wanted to hear ourselves speak so you know so to speak but we were getting questions about the things that were added to the book it wasn't that they were you know hey we just wanted we just wanted to hear ourselves talk more right we wanted we wanted to come up with some more esoteric you know things that nobody cared about we're the the material that is new for the book are all things that came up in the speaking engagements that you did in podcast responses in podcasts that you produced all of those kind of uh that feedback that we got after the book which is again part of why you write a book it's it's something that it's a platform from which you can go out and speak to audiences and you have an idea that you can present and you have something you can interact with um and that they can come to a speaking engagement and have a conversation with you at that point you know you you mentioned something that i'm going to go back to is this benchmark book thing i've told you this before i had a hard time like wrapping my head around that because that's kind of a tall order um we mentioned in the interview that is in the audio book that we that i had these books that i leaned on like the lord running like

jeff galloway's training program like better training for distance runners like these things that i had kind of like used as as coaching manuals for myself and when you when you initially said those words during the first edition of the book that was like super intimidating to say that like fuck i'm gonna like have to i was putting myself to have to live up to that level of standard right to that standard of all of those other benchmark books that i had used and time will tell whether or not this book and the next edition of this book and the third edition and the fourth edition and however many editions it goes to um uh time will tell whether that is ultimately going to be the case whether it is a reference book for for for forever but just the concept of it i had a really hard time wrapping my head around because of the enormity of that statement yeah but that that's the nature of i mean ironically that's the nature of coaching i mean we're our job as coaches is to help athletes to figure out or discover that they can do more than they think they can or that they're capable of doing something that they are intimidated by or uh that they have potential that they haven't recognized yet um so you didn't have to realize that you could do it i had to realize you could do it um and i was pretty confident that i knew that you had the subject matter to the domain expertise to do it we had no idea going into it

whether you the writing component was there um and i'm still up for debate well thankfully i mean you did a lot more of the tremendously more of the actual writing in the first edition than in the previous books that i'd worked on so and that was great you know because it was less that i had to do honestly um and it was it i think it came out better because it is most it is really your voice with some help as opposed to my voice with you know the information coming in yeah so corinne hasn't been privy to this process a lot um but so i just finished i just as we're recording this i just finished the bulk of the read for the audiobook which is kind of why we're sitting down now because there's actually a light at the end of the tunnel um there's pieces that i i wrote from scratch that i read there are pieces that ruddy initially wrote that we rewrote together that i read there are pieces that that corinne had written and then we rewrote and i read there uh there's a piece that sarah scazzaro wrote and then ruddy and i revised and i read by far the easiest one for me to read were the ones that i wrote myself the other ones were complete clusterfucks like i mean just every like every other word was taught like i just like i don't i don't this isn't like it's not that it's like

like fake or anything like that but it's definitely it definitely was really challenging because even though i had a big hand in the rest of the content i didn't originally didn't originally write it it was a hard thing to do way harder than i thought it was well when we started and you asked kind of like you know how to how to get started or how to do the first one i i was i didn't know it's such a rookie thing how do i start this book well i think i wrote the intro yeah because we had to write the the proposal and everything and the i think my my kind of simple advice was write like you speak i mean you're you how would you tell somebody this information verbally and just do that in writing and it usually is going to work out pretty well um if anything the the chapters that i had more of a hand in were probably and i felt bad while i was listening to you read it too because i recognized like oh wow i made this more complicated than than it needed to be or that it that it's hard to read because of the way i wrote it um because i don't do those speaking engagements and i don't do as much of the verbal delivery of those of books and of content so i'm used to just seeing things on paper and you when you're reading something in your head you can use words that you can't really pronounce yeah i'm so thankful that the outtakes are obliterated because the way that they're recorded is is when you flub it you literally record over the flub like actually record over the flub so

there's no b-roll maybe to vl to vl's the audio engineer who's he's great at what he does by the way um maybe he has a hidden stash of them that he'll release into the wild at some point but i don't think they'll they'll get out um let's let's kind of pivot a little bit to what's new right because i'm i'm really psyched about some of the new things that you mentioned ruddy the genesis is the genesis of the new things was really the feedback we were getting from the community and the lessons learned kind of from the first book not that there's anything wrong with it but we realized that it was very incomplete right um being a first edition we wanted to blend this the audience isn't really used to this type of content it was the first time a technical book like this had been written uh we try we're trying to blend that with having you know high quality content scientific content and a lot of times that's a hard balance to strike karen as you know from your articles with i run far one of the one of the key things that i was very thankful that i was insistent on from the get-go is i wanted a woman co-author and i wanted her to be able to write sections of the book in her own voice meaning it's not me actually writing it it's whoever whoever we choose to do it and this is a choice at the time right i came up with the concept first wanted a woman i wanted to write some women's specific sections but i wanted it to not be in my voice i wanted it to be in this other person's voice so other so the women who are reading it about women's specific stuff could really

identify it and there was no better choice for that that i have in my database or any other person's database to be honest with you than the new newest co-author to the collaboration here which is corinne malcolm so corinne you wrote the entirety of this woman's specific section as well as you wrote the entirety of the environmental section which i guess i get to kind of take credit for but that was all you i did remaster it a little bit you saw it but what i want to know what your experience was like because i approached you with a kind of a really specific hey we want these two sections and i was really insistent about it needs to this section needs to be in your voice in this other section we're going to try to remaster so that it fits kind of the flow of the book reflecting on it what did you think about that whole that whole process yeah it was a funky process because we there was a couple like i've written like some mini sections too that are kind of like smattered throughout the book and so and i knew the women's section would be in my voice and so it's easy to write in my voice and i had to learn how to be a ghost writer on the fly trying to keep Jason Koop's voice in my head so i kind of envision it like you know people have like an angel and a devil on their shoulders telling them to do things or not do things that i had my own little Jason Koop on my shoulder and be like what how would jason say this which one what shoulders are what side the angel side or the devil side i don't know if that's the angel side or the devil side it's

probably it depends on the day coffee yeah before or after coffee how late i was on a deadline you know whatever that might have been like but um it was really interesting because you know i really enjoy science writing and i enjoy taking these complex topics and trying to make them understandable for everyone um and do that every month in my column for i run far and so i got to write on topics that i was really familiar with as well um my educational background is in environmental physiology so you know basically got to regurgitate stuff that i've said over and over again um but other sections i had to learn more about um periodically and i thought that was you know it's always a fun learning process to pull the latest literature make sure you're not making anything up um to keep it i think i told you it had to be interesting and as factually accurate as possible while still being like um not simple but concise um and it's sometimes it's it's hard to be accurate and like appropriate at the appropriate level of explanation like you to choose what you leave out and what you leave in it's like teaching middle school math where you're like we'll teach you the other way to do this in a couple years so trying to keep it factual while being an engaging interesting digestible topic is often a big struggle with some of these scientific categories well the way the way that that really got illuminated was

through the technical edits which is another aspect that i i am just i cannot tell the audience in in you guys and these two individuals who provided the technical edits how appreciative i am with their counsel and the two people that i'm talking about are stephanie howe and nick tiller both both of whom make kind of appearance appearances in the audio book but they went through the entire manuscript went through every single citation made sure that those citations were accurately uh portraying the research that they were referencing and really took things through a fine-toothed comb and they elevated the level of content within the book the level of accuracy that the information is presented on into your point corinne part of the pain point is presenting the these technical topics with that level of accuracy that people can also understand i i just i i'm just through the moon with how that actually how that actually played out at the end of the day because from where nick took the first crack of the book i gave him what i thought was a pretty good and complete copy and nick is really really smart he's been on this podcast twice he wrote very appropriately the skeptic's guide to sport science that hit that's his that's his thing right is being a skeptic in sport science he tore the thing

apart and it was really humbling to read like very very very humbling to read but it's going to serve the audience just in this really incredibly immensely powerful way because you can be you can be sure that the way that the information is is presented is done so with like the highest level of scientific integrity and then stephanie got like the second you know like kick at the wounded dog so after i had you know gone through all of nick's edits i kind of went through the whole thing i passed it off to steph who just had her first child by the way like so kudos to steph for like being the freaking iron woman warrior cranking this thing out with the freaking infant you know at her at her side the entire time it just got raised up another notch so i'm just really i that's one of the areas of the that's one of the like the new areas of not only the book but like the process as a whole that i'm just really really grateful i bit the bullet on i you know spent a little bit of extra money in the production of the book i had to eat some humble pie across the process but it's going to it's i'm just really happy with the way the book and the product turned out after all their after all their counsel i think that the edits the the edit process after getting it back from them was the more difficult um uh process and because now you're we were looking at comments and at recommendations

or suggestions and having to go okay yeah i see that point but can we really what do we do with it do we do we if we make that change it's going to mean half a chapter more of explanation or have we gotten it close enough you know from a which thing is again going back to current's point of how much can you explain because there's always going to be a yeah but yeah to all of these things like well you're here's how you do heat acclimation well yeah but then there's this and this and this and this so there's always going to have to be that decision point of where's the where's the stopping point of this is how we're going to say it and how we're going to leave it i think the the what i call the logical extensions of the research that we have to do a lot in coaching and we have to look at sports science research and then make it applicable to athletes tell them hey go out and run two hours or go strength train or kind of whatever we're taking that research that's done in a very clinical setting and applying it to people in the real world but the bigger extensions of that research one of the things that i think is kind of clear throughout the book is when we're actually taking those the research says this here's what you can extrapolate from that here's how you can apply it to your to your day-to-day training the mental skills chapter in particular which is the next thing that i kind of wanted to transition to is a really good example of that where all of the research is it's kind of fractured and it really doesn't have

a lot of like really compelling evidence in terms of if you do this you will improve by 10 which the physiological research does right you go through this interval training protocol before after your vo2 max is up by five percent right there's a lot of that type of research in physiology and psychology there's not and you have to take these bigger extensions of the research and i think one of the ways that that kind of like came through was presenting the landscape of all of the research and what different practitioners do and then laying it out to an athlete in a periodized manner like i like the the the the not to give too much of the you know farm away or anything like that might result in like two extra two two fewer book sales but part part of the narrative of that mental skills chapter is you should be periodizing your mental skills in the same context as your as your training and i just once again it was just one of those things that i'm just really happy at all kind of like it kind of came together like that but the the gist of it is is we had to create a lot of logical extensions of the research in that area in particular which is fine that's the way it has to happen okay i want to get to the next area that's new which i'm super stoked about it is the audio book so ruddy what's the length total right now when we left this recording studio a couple days ago was it

was it yesterday a couple days ago okay um well let's put it this way with the raw edit he the 2vl had to figure out how to to go beyond 24 hours i forgot about that and it was the first time in his career that the the session reached the limit of the software and all of a sudden it just stopped and he's looking at it like i don't exactly know what happened and we wait we wait a couple minutes and everything else he goes oh i think that it has a maximum of 24 hours we just have to start a new session but it is the first time in his career that he had reached the end reached that that problem the true ultra running style right there we broke the software like we broke the software duration capacity now granted there that's the that was the the unedited you know version there are plenty of big breaks in there and it'll get shorter in editing and things but not that much shorter so we're looking at 20 hours roughly 20 to 24 hours once it gets all like kind of edited down we don't know exactly what the number is but it's about 3x that of actual studio time just to give the listeners some perspective so 20 hours at 60 hours in a booth 6 000 f-bombs from yours truly that will never get released hopefully corinne had probably a few dozen in the ones that uh she read um but one so first off there's an audiobook go check it on audible or whatever wherever everybody catches that

these days um i'm really happy with such a good sell yeah i know right once again we've already we've already we've already established that we're not in it for the money so you know um but uh so there's audiobook i was insistent that i read it since i have i literally have a voice i have a podcast and things like that and i didn't think that doing it with a voice actor um would uh uh would kind of kind of do it justice we use the audiobook as part of the editing process which is really cool that was uh some advice that uh my late friend uh david clark gave me who actually recorded his final audiobook before he passed away in the same studio that uh we were recording the audiobook is uh dedicated to him and um one of the unique features which i completely stole from david goggins shout out to you david i know you're not going to get too mad at me brother but the audiobook is interspersed with these really cool punchy super practical interviews and they range everywhere from an interview with ruddy and i to an interview with nick who i mentioned earlier who was a technical editor of the book uh interviews with people like emily krauss we talk about bone health interviews with uh stephanie who was also a technical editor of the book we talk about nutrition interviews with people like justin ross who's a sports psychologist and they're strategically placed at these points one to give you a break from my voice because i can't imagine the listener on the other end listening to like 20

some odd hours of just me talking about like physiology and training and stuff like that but it it it really ties together the practical elements that people are going to take the contents of this book and do something with them to your first point ruddy right they're going to listen to this and say okay i'm going to go run xyz hours uh tomorrow so i'm going to really quickly play what some of that sounds like this is an interview with nick tiller and i can't remember offhand which one this actually is this is showing my audio engineering inadequacies right here but if you can imagine i'm reading the book and all of a sudden we take what i call a break in the read it all kind of starts out the same uh the same way and this is what it sounds like okay we are going to take another quick break in the read right here and this time it is with nick tiller PhD who is a technical advisor on the book and more important for this discussion he's the author of the skeptics guide to sports science confronting myths of the health and fitness industry nick i want to talk about something that is rife in the ultramarathon world something that is related to the weighted vest section i just read and that is using anecdote to drive training practice we just went over one of the techniques found in ultra running that has been popularized predominantly by anecdote and that is the use of weighted vests okay so you can imagine that like every hour or so some like really cool punchy interview like that and just to give 2vl some credit that that audio for that hasn't quite been

mastered and gone through all of his magic that he does which is why it's a little like electronically sounding for people who are have particularly sensitive ears but the whole book has these sprinkled in them with like almost like you're sprinkling in salt or sprinkles on a cupcake or something like that and i think they add like the perfect like spice and texture to the whole thing that just ties a lot of the topics together and i'm super i'm just super happy with how it turned out you listened to some of them ready didn't you yeah yeah and i think a lot i think there's the the variety component to it but we also use them in places where the content um is visually compelling in the book and difficult to a little bit more difficult to get across in just audio so there was there were places where the if you're looking at the book in print there's going to be some references and some things that are easy to um to pick up that we couldn't quite explain just by reading them so bringing somebody in to talk a little bit more about it um in a slightly different detail um help to you know illustrate those points that you're going to get if you're reading the book um in print but are a little bit harder to convey in just straight audio it's hard to describe a graph yeah well you've got this u curve and at the bottom of the u curve it's kind of squiggly and then what that means is you're

right we we were we literally replaced some of the visuals with audio interviews now go ahead go ahead corinne i say which like does a total disservice to all the work that the very fair abby hall did on all those beautiful graphs so but they get all of the beautiful graphs in the digital packet that comes with the audio uh with the audio book so they're going to get it it's just that if you're if you're listening to the audiobook while running down a trail which is probably what a lot of people are going to be doing they're not going to have the the they're not going to be seeing it at the same time so um really it is a very complete work in the sense of you do get a digital packet that has all of those visuals in it you have the added audio uh interviews and then you have the read on top of it yeah and you have access to that for forever like it's it's literally a download you can reference those charts thank you for mentioning abby corinne and so those for those of you that don't know abby hall is an elite runner with adidas is that how we pronounce it now adidas long a yeah okay and she's she's very good runner uh qualified for western states this year just recently canyons maybe this will come out like right when western states is being run who knows this is when we put our unbiased plug in for abby yeah abby's for western states there we go um yeah but having an illustrator that knows the content really well is a godsend one abby's a very talented and i'm not giving her enough credit

she's she both created the illustrations as well as styled the book which both of those are big parts of it like people think you just write something down on word and then bingo bango poof magic wand fairy dust and all of a sudden it turns into a book i mean it actually has to be what's called styled into the right format with the right layouts and the colors and the headers have to all match and it's got to fit within the parameters of the size of the book that's a that's a monumental task so she did all that she did the cover art um and um uh the fact that she knew the content not only from having the previous edition of the book but also being coached by me one was good for her as an athlete right because she gets to see all the content and then apply it to her to her own training and the content is authentic i mean i you know it's everything that i do as a coach but she it was immediately relatable to her so we could come up with an illustration on nutrition and take this in at one hour and take this in at two hours and take this in at three hours she's like oh okay i would know how to visually create like an infographic style illustration for exactly this because that's how i would want to see it as a runner which so anyway that part was awesome yeah she took our very terrible illustrations and made them and charts like really confusing flow charts and made them palatable more than palatable like we i we owe abby so much in that sense because our our terrible like printer paper whiteboard

scribbles like were brought to life by abby well there were three flavors of this right go ahead ready the first version of that i will not forget this is is jason in your old office in the in the cts headquarters yeah and the whiteboard and it was the the stick figure uh oh yeah graphic yeah with it was sort of this you know 3x size so that you could do the you have like protractors and getting the angles right and everything else and we're making it on the whiteboard taking photos of it making the changes it was like doing um uh the animation of this stick figure to get all the angles right and like it then and on the first edition then one of the issues was that we were handing it off developers who didn't necessarily know all of the ins and outs of what the illustrations were that they were getting and then we ended up with a couple of problems here and there not that the end point was was poor but it took a lot more back and forth to get it right because we would get things back and be like yeah that doesn't look right yeah and i have to go back and back and back to the illustrators where it was definitely more streamlined uh with abby that so that illustration that you just mentioned ready that i think the audience will appreciate how this came to light so not only was there's this monstrosity of electrical tape and protractors and thing and things drawn in the margin on my whiteboard but the way so the illustration that we're talking about i don't know the number right off the top of my head but it has four stick figures that compare running on level ground

running uphill running downhill and walking all in this representation to demonstrate how the joint segment angles are different in all of those forms of locomotion at the same point which we determined was going to be foot strike and toe off right so we're trying to calibrate all of those there's no singular research paper that actually does that so what i did is i think that i think that there were four or five different papers that i pulled all together to try to create these three these three makes me sound like i work at pixar or something like that it's very much very much not the case to create these stick figures these very rudimentary stick figures that i then calibrated literally with the protractor because the paper did not have illustrations it's not like i'm alchemizing illustrations from research papers i'm alchemizing the data from those different research papers okay this knee angle is at this degree so i take that i draw it out on the whiteboard measure with the protractor tape over it with electrical tape and i would repeat that for every single joint angle across all four of those modalities it was like at least five or seven days worth of work just to put that one uh illustration together and nick's comment on that after he after he reviewed it was that's pretty cool and that made me feel so good like after nick gets done trashing me for like 14

chapters or whatever just like the four little words that's this is actually pretty cool so i was like oh look at that all that work actually kind of got it kind of paid off but so the longer the short of his shout out to abby hall who's the illustrator very fortunate that she came on board with this process she did she did a fantastic job and uh the fact that it's all relatable to her is great i think that's another one of the things i didn't think about all this content is by endurance athletes right i mean it's all we kind of own it we're endurance athletes we're invested in the sport we you know if we don't get it right it's all our faults but we should know what we're doing i guess is what i'm saying um a lot of times when you work with a publisher and once again i'm very i think we're both ready and i are very fortunate that we could initially work with velo press on this but one of the problems of the publisher is they don't know the space well enough to be able to provide like guidance on certain on like certain parts of the content i guess is what i'm trying to communicate i don't know that i would necessarily agree with that i think that that especially there so i've had the opportunity to work with some of the larger sort of mass market publishers as well as velo press so if you're working with say rodale or penguin or some of those i think that's where you end up with more of an acquisitions editor or a development editor who really has very little experience in what your subject matter is um velo press is a specialized publisher in mostly endurance sport so at least they have a they know the

context they know and especially they know the audience so um one of the things with and one of the kind of pain points that we ran into a little bit was of them saying hey this is what's going to sell in this in terms of this is what people are purchasing and the tone and the length and the level of complexity and then that was you know there's a push and pull there all the time between i want it to be more technical well it needs to be a little bit more mainstream and you're pushing and pulling on and trying to find the right balance there um but i think they do a very good job at knowing what that endurance athlete audience wants and and and finding it because the larger publishers the the penguins and and not to not to call out any one individual age but just in general the large uh publishers um they do a very good job on in in certain areas but in the niche of endurance sports velo press really i think has has done a good job at at um figuring out what that audience is looking for and finding authors and finding books that um that can be published in that sense not only that but they you know i i've i guess i'm somewhat loyal to to uh develop rest in in the sense that they support their titles uh long term um some of the other books that are that are in there whether it's the time crunch cyclist and time crushed athlete or joe friel's books with

with training bible and uh the uh training and racing with the power meter if those books have been published by you know one of the very big mainstream publishers they would have been published once and been done um but because of the way that develop press because of their philosophy they support that that catalog very very well so that endurance athletes uh can can purchase those books for long term well the big publishers not to get too you know nitty-gritty with the publishing industry because nobody cares but it's my podcast i can talk about whatever i want to the the big the big publishers they're like at the casino they're looking for the next david goggins book to use his name again they're looking for the next book that's going to get into top five on amazon and then they're set for the year they don't have to worry about anything else so they just roll the dice with 10 or 20 different people across a rep more than that but a lot of people across a lot of different genres and they ride the winning horses until they're dead and the horses they suck that suck they just put them out to pasture and you know let them live their you know life on other i mean literally that's the way it works they make all their profit off of a very few titles and if you're in that group you're going to get a lot of support but if you're not it's kind of like me like you what you need some marketing money for this i don't know i don't know if we could i don't know if we could do this you're ranking on amazon's in the you know hundred thousands like it's just a really rough really rough industry right and then you go back to your early statement about

80 percent of the books don't make more than their royalty or their their uh advance money well that's part of the reason is that the you you essentially write the book they put it out um you get about three weeks worth of marketing to see whether or not it's going to catch or not and if it doesn't you're pretty much done and if it does then they put you know they kind of shuttle the money behind it um and that's just sort of the way that market is so some of the smaller publishers i think are finding ways to kind of beat that system a little bit and then the self-publishing world is beating that system or changing that system um as well so i think if anything this environment and you going from sort of a specialty publisher and then not going to self-publishing is the way that things are are progressing for um books that wouldn't otherwise get the level of support that that they need in order to to exist corinne does this make you want to write your own book all this banter about not making any money it's a shit ton of work your publishers don't want to support you it's definitely not a strong sell let's put it that way my my one of my younger brothers is a self-publishing like young adult fiction author and he just like loves it and like does his own thing and is having a great time and i recognize that the things i want to write are like super super niche and so it's like what do you what do you do with that i don't know it's risky it's well i guess that

goes back to a question for jason really is okay so you wrote the first one basically because i could jolt you into it and then we're working on the second one what did you either find that the benefit was for having the book out there and then therefore once after the benefit of the first one what was the incentive then to do the second one um that's a good question self-punishment um no i mean i i really i not to sound not to like get to egotistical on the thing but it really resonated with me to continue to have a benchmark book out there um that was that that's once i realized that it has the potential to do so and i like wholeheartedly believed it i kind of viewed it as like part of my legacy which is it's hard to it's hard to say those things in real time because the history books will eventually write your legacy but i'd be i'd be fooling myself if that didn't cross my that didn't like cross my brain uh from time to time the other piece uh is circling back to something that we mentioned earlier is there was so much more that i wanted to do with it that either got left on the cutting room floor or i just didn't do very well there are a lot of things that i wanted to explain differently i was going to say fix but that's not the right word

there's a lot of things that i wanted to explain differently or with or more thoroughly or put a different context on the strength training chapter is a great piece is a great uh uh example of that where the first edition of the book i had it written and it got put on the cutting room floor for kind of for a variety of reasons and got turned into a sidebar and i got hammered on it i got in the you know amazon comments and shit like that which if you ever publish a book don't read the amazon comments because you can't do anything about it you know when you go to write a second book then go and read that and take it into context but don't read it in real time because there's nothing you could do about it and all it is is not all but it's a lot of it's irritating but one of the bigger criticisms of the book was that one section out of a hundred thousand words that the book contains a 500 word sidebar gets all of this vitriol from the community i was like okay well all right i'll take that i didn't explain that correctly i didn't fight to leave the content in there enough i guess so i'm gonna go and redo it and i'm gonna do it right and that's exactly what i did i brought in the experts i brought in sarah hey sarah let's go ahead and let's design this let's come up with the content collaboratively together and now there's a whole chapter a whole freaking chapter which is like 10,000 words from a 500 word sidebar 10,000 words just on strength training for ultra running and the sentiment is still the same so there you go you don't have to buy the new book just for the strength training chapter because the end result the end not the end end result but the end sentiment i guess is

is is very similar it's not the same we do give a like a grid practical overlay of here's where it can work here's where it doesn't work here's what you need to watch out for and also the implementation side of it just like the training side there are no answers right there's no static training program in the book that's another thing that i don't mind getting hammered on that because that's an integrity issue from my perspective um so those of you expecting a static training program in the book you will be sorely disappointed don't go buy it and bitch about the fact that there is not one i'm telling you right now that there's no static training programs in the book don't complain about it if you were expecting them um what was i saying about that oh the strength training chapter uh there is just like the periodization side of things just like the run periodization side just like the psychology side of things there is framework that if you apply a remedial amount of logic and thought to you can look at it and say okay here's how i'm going to design my strength training program and that's the theme throughout the whole book is for somebody to look at it put a little bit of thought into it and be able to diy things them themselves as opposed to just here's the answer or here's what i did with dakota or here's how corinne trains like it's very much written from the standpoint of we want people to absorb the information synthesize it and be able to make their own decisions and it's a reference book i mean i think that's the reason that nobody that i for instance didn't fight against hey we can't get

this book to be this long it can't be 20 chapters and whatever because when you look at a book like this um i don't know that too many people some people are going to read it cover to cover but if they do they're also going to skip around or after the fact it's like oh i remember there was something about strength training let me go look it up yeah it's i don't remember the part about nutrition i'm going to go look it up hey i'm having trouble with hydration and sodium levels oh there's a section in about that in the book i'm going to go look that up so i think we produced it in such a way that um it didn't have to be quick moving and entertaining to that it's not at well at its core i think that there are some books that are written whether they're some books even as non-fiction that are written in such a way that they're just that they're trying to you know keep you hooked and and kind of written with a more of a marketing um gist to them this one is more we know it's going to be a reference book um as much as it's going to be a cover to cover book there's some i mean corinne you kind of mentioned this in in your section as well there's some like first person narrative parts to it not in the sense of i did this so you should do it as well but stories that kind of tie together the major themes or just make them relatable like i have the crispy cream story of how the rice balls originated where you know originally i just stopped by crispy cream and i shoved them all into a bag and i said oh i just need to make this a little bit better food content so i'm going to create this

rice ball recipe which i totally stole from say stacy sims that's another theme in the book that i'm just like stealing and adapting things from other people and putting putting my own my own little spin on them but i took her you know kind of rice ball recipe strategy or whatever and i put it into that crispy cream you know sandwich bag format and voila you know that kind of thing took off so there it's not so dry that it's just a bunch of like academia stuff there's stories what was the one in your corinne remind me again in the women's section there was some like really like punchy part that you had in there do you remember what it was or maybe it was in the environmental section that was punchy yeah i just remember reading it and going oh that's actually kind of funny oh i mean i don't know i'm kind of a little bit sarcastic but i don't know that i think that's more what it was it was like do you really think this is a good idea it was something like that yeah like i'm kind of a sassy human being so i feel like there were things throughout and honestly i got really sassy during the editing process like much praise to our to to uh stephanie howe and to nick tiller but there were some edits i was like yes change yes change and then there's some where i like would comment back to the edits and i would be like well if you look at this paper like total like i would just like you know and then he'd like say something nice about my writing or steph would text me and be like oh you did a good job i'd be like yes it's hard not to take some things personally in that

process i mean you've you've spent so much time right you've spent so much time working on it and to have someone else come back and go yeah but this is wrong you're like oh wait you know how what do you mean but it's yeah it's necessary though like that's why i wanted nick and steph on there nick very specifically because he doesn't mind telling it like it is yeah and i was very up front with him when i brought him onto the project i was like be harsh i don't care the harsher the better i've got thick skin i can take it i just want the best product that's out there stephanie because i have a good relationship with her like i coach her and we've known each other for for a long time she doesn't mind telling me like it is either even in our coach athlete relationship like we have a good back and forth that you know we don't we we're very very honest and open with each other and you need that and you need that in editors otherwise you just get you know a bunch of oh you're doing a great job and all of this is awesome and you're the best writer ever and like that doesn't there is not a lot of that yeah that doesn't elevate the content though that's what i keep coming back to like you need somebody to go through with a fine-tooth comb that's kind of harsh to elevate the content my biggest dilemma or or uh hesitation point in the whole process was you sent me a revision of of either the intro or chapter one or something like that and i read it and it was a lot of work that had gone into it and i remember sitting there going i don't think we can use this and i don't

know how to tell jason that without really hurting his feelings like i did not want to be the person to send that email but i'm like okay eventually i'm just gonna have to send this because i'm gonna feel really bad if i don't but this is not gonna be easy to tell him no i took that very well i'm glad you did that i started just to give a little bit of backstory i wanted the intro to have a to have a little bit of to use karen's word have a little bit of sass have a little punch in it like i wanted to address some of the criticisms i wanted to kind of go through my background and things like that because i think that's compelling storyline and when people people do judge books by their covers and as much as flippant as i am about i don't care if people buy it i do there's an economic incentive for me to to for people to buy books and people will read the first inter that people will just read the introduction whatever is like you know amazon's preview or whatever and they'll decide to buy it just based off of that and so i wanted to create some compelling dialogue i guess is what i'm getting down to i just didn't want to go this is a book about trading ultra marathons you're gonna be better and faster and stronger after having read it i wanted to have some compelling content and i just think i went a little bit overboard with creating something like like uh something a little bit controversial so ruddy brought me back down there but it's still it's still like i go through yeah the strength training piece i go through the criticisms that have been leveled at me about the training philosophies and things like that by coaches by people in in the industry because it's not just i'm trying to be controversial to like drum up shit yeah that's

part of it i'll totally admit it but i think that that's also part of the storyline i think that that's important for people to know that a it's not just me thinking some of these things i bring people into the room other experts and collaborators to help figure the things out but i'm not the only game in town i realize that there are people that are coaches or athletes or other practitioners out there that don't have the same opinion as me as i do on certain topics and that's fine i don't mind bringing that stuff to the forefront and just saying here's the buffet of ideas right you can kind of like figure here's what i think about it but i don't mind i don't mind presenting that landscape yeah the as i said the you should have said corinne did you actually see it the tone of the one that you said was a little bit aggressive to the point of like i don't know that people are going to get to chapter two if you do this let's just soften up a little bit of that let's just put it this way i told a really good story corinne will will know who this individual is the listeners might not so i'll go into a little bit of detail i i tell this good story about our my our very good colleague and friend uh dean golich who was who was actually very impactful on my coaching career because he was because he was so hard on me and he was so hard on everybody like really brutally every single day relent relentlessly difficult on the coaching product that that you put forward because he viewed that as a

direct reflection of him because we're all in the same kind of the same organization and so i used that story as a kind of a formative part of my coaching development where i didn't have it very easy i didn't know a whole lot i didn't come from a PhD level background i didn't have ivy league education i was working in sport groups of which i had no clue no clue i was a runner and i was working with cyclists and triathletes i had no idea about the culture how the sport worked or anything like that i had to freaking learn everything and every single day i got my ass handed to me by dean who would just take me to the woodshed you don't know what you're talking about you need to go look this up this is you know dog shit training like the whole like the whole nine yards and i i went a little bit overboard on painting painting that picture but the fact of the matter is is that was really formative in my coaching career not just dean but the whole group of coaches that i initially came into contact with which i'm still very i'm still very grateful to have uh to to to have that experience but you're right ruddy it was that story was not portrayed very well yeah i mean you and i came up in an interesting environment i mean we were both in that environment with dean um with jt i mean it was it was a environment where we were relatively inexperienced very inexperienced in what we were doing and then in a there wasn't as much of a um in other places there's a hierarchy that goes you

know like beginners and middle managers and whatever else we were dumped in with very very elite people yeah from a very very early age and um that was a very formative uh experience for both of us because yeah it was it was definitely a trial by fire it was trial by fire so corinne now you know we've been through this dialogue privately but i'll say it publicly now you know why i'm so hard on you i'm not that hard on you anymore but i was hard on you initially um as well as what you told i was gonna say this is i think that it's illustrated by when um i was getting hired to be a long-term sub last year um yeah that's right stella my like the one of the dean of faculty called you up and she wanted to know how i take criticism and you said nothing anyone says to corinne will be harsher or meaner than any criticism i've ever given her and also more honest i said that too yeah no i was like no but okay that has to be couched with like we're painting a picture of jason as this as an ogre and he's not like you know his bedside manner could use a little bit of you know softening but um it's not done abusively it's done very constructively and um with care yeah but i think it's this it's very similar to the way the tone that's in the book is accurate to the way that you coach and the way that you work with with colleagues as well which is it's compassionate to a point and then there's a

point of you're just going to have to do this yeah um and i think that that is part and parcel with ultra running in general um there is a a lot of compassion that happens out on courses and in training and things like that but at a certain point ultra running comes down to either you're going to get this done or you're not that is 100 correct i never actually thought about it like that but that's a pretty dark pretty dark good analogy you got to go get over the finish line with your own two feet um but needless to say um a lot of the to to ping off of your point ruddy a lot of the content within the book is a direct reflection of that upbringing so i'd be remiss not to mention not only dean but as you mentioned jt kearney who have a podcast as well who once again if there was ever an angel that came down before my coaching career it was it was definitely jt kearney who did have the right balance of compassion and criticism he did that better than no other person i could have ever imagined and i remember every single wednesday i could get two hours of his time if i bought him a venti what was it it's a venti uh caramel macchiato and a pumpkin scone over at uh uh over at starbucks and this is at a time where i didn't have two nickels to rub together so plunking down 10 bucks to get two hours of somebody's time to go over physiology was actually a pretty big spin for me but i did that relentlessly and every single week when i got that kind of one-on-one time with jt

that made a bigger impact on my in the entire trajectory of my career as compared to almost anything else that i've ever done everything makes a little bit of a difference but that those three or four years that i get to work with him in that capacity was was incredibly formative so well jt's your experience with nick and stephanie or our experience with nick and stephanie my first version of that was jt ripping apart a manuscript of mine and like you what it was you'd go into those meetings just having to like leave your you just had to leave your ego at the door um because if you tried to defend you know like if you got defensive about it you were just not it wasn't going to work out very well for you and you just had to you know and that was in itself a learning process to you know the to accept criticism constructive criticism that way in in editing and one of the things that i've told coaches who write um things because i think i view my career a lot as trying to help coaches get their messages and voices out there uh in in creating content one of the things that i tell them often is once you put it out there it's not yours anymore yeah you can't be next to your article you can't be next to your book and go yeah but this is what i meant it has to once it's in their hands they get to determine what it is and what it means and all of those things you can't be there um which means that you have to be willing to go through that level

of criticism ahead of time and in the in the editing process because otherwise it's gonna you're not gonna be happy with what the feedback is when you put it out in the world that was scary shit to me when i couldn't edit anymore the first version when i remember this really distinctly we were going back and forth with the copy editor so at that stage of the book all the content is done you're just fixing like where the lines are and stuff like that and i'd found this flub i can't even remember what it was it was like something on an axis or something like something kind of immaterial that i probably should have noticed earlier and i noticed it and i started this email to the to the copy editor hey can you just fix this you know this kind of like one last thing i got distracted go figure i got distracted and i came back to my computer like 20 or 30 minutes later and i sent the email and casey the editor casey blaine uh shout out to her the editor at the time uh who was working on it she said oh we already sent it to the printer it's like but no but no like there's no i can't erase all you know however many tens of thousands of copies you're gonna print this is one thing it's like oh we'll fix it in the second printing yeah but that's damn it you know how many how many of the great american novels are sitting on somebody's you know shelf or on somebody's uh in somebody's computer because they are continually doing that to them and never ever getting them off to somebody like as as we were saying

with uh 2vl and other people like you will always be able to find something you're gonna change at some point you're gonna have to kick it over the fence and go yep this is what i'm how it is that i'm gonna put it out corinne are you scared so you've written a lot for iron far it's a website right you can catch shit after the fact and go oh wait wait you got to change this one thing and it's not that hard of it that's not that hard of a fix this is permanent right it's not well it's the book version is permanent are you scared to have something permanently erroneous that your name is attached to in perpetuity it's a little intimidating right when i write comment when i write when i write comments when i write articles for for us for cts or for iron far like there's a comment section and oftentimes you know it's encouraged at least with iron far that i go back through and i i engage with the commenters which sometimes can be equally daunting maybe um so i don't know if it's better or worse to not like once it's out there in a book like i don't have to engage the comment section so that there's something like attractive about that though a little bit you don't have to engage the comment section i love it the book uh all right so we're gonna sit here this book is going to be released probably the week that this podcast comes out ruddy what number is this for you nine nine nine jesus man i can't imagine that nine books i didn't start out wanting to do this it just sort of fell into it and um as i said i i wish you and i started out in in coaching you went full force into

what kind of personal coaching i realized relatively early on that i liked the not only having the ability to have influence on larger number of athletes by through content as opposed to one-on-one coaching but i also really liked seeing you and jim layman and dean gollett and everybody else um that you guys could really focus on coaching and i could focus on getting your voices out and getting messaging out um because i liked the impact of that um so yeah one thing led to the other and here we are here we are nine books later two of which by accident yeah by accident right um this is two for me there's a lot of books we can take credit for now already we can start our own little publishing house i've thought about it but i don't oh god but uh no i think you know the nice thing i think velopress is going to um you know they've had a lot of um progression or advancement with being now being outside and everything and active pass and um i'm looking forward to i think active that velopress is going to really get cranking up again uh within outside and i think there are some opportunities not only for some other cts coaches potentially to uh have books in there and and other ideas that that could run through that because not everyone's going to be as gung-ho to do um uh self-publishing the way you were i don't know i mean once again i kind of got forced into it with

right i mean they didn't for i could have waited right i can do whatever i want to but it definitely forced my hand into it and i don't know yet don't ask me the question if you're thinking about it i don't know that i don't know if i let's get this one out the door and i can think about self-publishing or trying to shop it out to a publisher and next go around corin you'll have to be involved in that if you want to i don't know if this process is now like screw you guys i'm going home one and done but corinne yeah did we sign a blood pack at some point in time like a patch that's been put together it's inherent it's once your name's on it it's it's one of the assumptions but congratulations first off corinne's your first book i know it was it was special for me especially for uh ruddy uh first time you're gonna get when you get a galley copy and you see your name and print permanently permanently attached to this and you're gonna go around to all the local bookstores and realize that none of them give a shit about it you're not gonna find it but it's still it's still pretty i actually did that i went to barnes and nobles and i tried to find it in places and it wasn't anywhere the physical book it was so depressing my mother used to go to bookstores my mother used to go to bookstores and move the books around so that if it wasn't on the end cap she would put it on the end cap if it wasn't the book that was facing out on the on the shelves she would rearrange the shelves so the book was facing out it was pretty funny we're gonna hire barbara burke for pr on this one i love that yeah i'm excited i it's you know i was thrilled when you asked me to be part of this

project and it's so cool to get it like i will be thrilled when i like get to like hold my copy of the book and you get to listen to it you get to listen oh yeah and i get to listen to listen to your voice read a whole chapter what was the hardest word that you had to say by the way oh i had that sentence i don't know if anyone recalls that sentence that had like all of the um disorders diseases and conditions that uh hormonal birth control can help alleviate and we like made it through in one take and then i flubbed at the very end on like an easy word and so we're able to cut in though so i didn't have to reread the whole sentence because there was no way i was going to make it through it after that so yeah i was disappointed with how many times i used the word progesterone throughout a chapter that was very intimidating yeah well you said it you said it good uh but yeah you get to listen to it so congratulations grin thank you for coming on to the project i don't know if you i don't know if you realized the the enormity or the extent of how this was actually going to turn out nor could i because it seems to you know once again i'm not bound by a publisher so it seemed to morph from book to audiobook to audiobook with these reads interspersed in them there'll probably be something else associated with this after it's all said and done but i hope uh i hope you enjoyed the process it was good growth for you as a coach right yeah for sure and of course we'll make tens of dollars off of it yeah i'm gonna hook up like a little teardrop

trailer to the the sprinter van and we can we can take this show on the road oh my gosh well yeah maybe when it comes out the coveted restrictions will be lifted enough to where we can actually do some physical things at run shops and things like that i enjoyed that a lot with the first edition going around and and and doing that that was really fun so he knows what comes of it ready number nine is number 10 do you have a 10th one coming around you not currently um i was fortunate in in 2020 right at the same time that they were putting uh the second edition of this book on hold they green light the uh they green lighted a the final book that they green lighted was a book called ride inside um that joe freil and i were working on probably because it was on in riding indoors and everybody was riding indoors during the pandemic joe and actually wait a minute wait hold on so they kicked me to the curb because they're like ah he's all this ultra running thing's not going to work out very well but let's go let's go ride the ride inside horse we're going to ride that to the very end wait a minute we can make money on that wait a minute that book had been in process for two years prior to the pandemic okay likely story and joe had had that book in the works for quite a while it was mostly it was actually done um in january of 2020 um and so it was in that beginning of production so it was just the last one that they continued working on uh and so convenient yeah so it was definitely good timing very convenient maybe i'm going to start the conspiracy

theory that you guys engineered the pandemic so everybody had to ride inside you can sell more books instead of selling 10 copies you can sell 20 exactly no i'll do respect to joe you've worked with some cool authors and i'm not just saying that because i've worked with you but you work with chris and you had a lot of cool titles to chris you were joe joe's fantastic author really well respected one of the most highly respected coaches in the endurance world yeah and then you get to work with lowly little me you spread the gamut man like you triathlon cycling running shit dude y'all go hot you guys need a freaking co-author or ghostwriter or like go ruddy he's the most experienced person in the game seriously it's been as i said it's been fun and i i like the idea of uh one of the things that i've realized over the years is that different coaches or different people in general have their strengths in the sense that some people i was talking to another coach actually who he does vlogs and he's really very good at them and he and i were talking and he said i can't do what you do i can't write every time i try to write it comes out terribly but i can do it on video and i'm the opposite i am horrible on video i'm horrible in front of a camera but i can write so it's kind of playing to your strengths and doing the things that you can do and the um with a variety of coaches i've tried over the years i know that they're smart people i know that they're really good at their jobs and if i can help them to get the that message out in a way that

they might not be willing to do i mean if we hadn't done the first edition of this book you'd still be kind of in your little office coaching a lot of people and doing very well at it but probably not you know sharing that information with as many people as we could have and as we have because i was able to cajole you into doing something with a greater uh a greater reach yeah corinne you'll be amazed at the reach you you don't have any concept of it like we're kind of like saying how silly and small the community is or whatever but because it's silly and small you'll every single race you go to you'll have somebody that has your section dog-eared and you're gonna love it so or it'll be really awkward like really awkward no my like my i think like the moment maybe i'm most proud of so far in my like coaching writing running career is that my mom was waiting for me at michigan bluff during western states i think she's at michigan bluff maybe she was at the river crossing doesn't matter but um someone said like oh what runner are you waiting for and my mom was like oh i'm waiting for my daughter corinne malcolm and the person was like oh i love her articles on iron bar it wasn't like oh yeah she should be coming soon it was like oh yeah i really i really like her articles yeah the reach that was pretty cool the reach is incredible so you'll you'll dig it well thank you guys i can't wait for it to hit the shelves or virtual shelves and amazon which tend to dominate

everything now uh i'm i like i said i can't uh i can't thank you guys enough and just really i can't express my feelings enough to just say how happy with the final product i am it's and i was not always confident that it was going to be something that i could put my name on is writing very well knows but you guys were a big part in turn turning that into reality where i can look at it and go this is pretty this is really freaking awesome so thank you you did most of the work yeah we're we're the supporting characters i don't know about that you guys are going to become the main character at some point they're going to want they're going to want the current malcolm book with Jason Koop and possibly jim robert all right folks there you have it there you go the book is out in the wild go get your hands on it or if you're so inclined go check out the audible version of it i i'm really happy with the way the audio book turned out special shout out to 2vl levy for uh helping this rookie reader sound at least uh moderately competent but the audio book is fantastic uh i brought in a number of special guests for it and i just i cannot believe that i was able to get that many high quality people through all corners of the community together to contribute to that so go check the book out go check the audio book out or go check

out both if you are so inclined special thanks to corinne and to jim rutberg for graciously becoming the co-authors on this book and putting up with all of my incessant edits and re-edits and edits after the re-edits also in addition to that very special thanks to stephanie howe and nick tiller for providing a lot of the scientific edits and guidance on this book you too raised the content of the book to heights that i could not have imagined you saved me from a lot of bloopers and in addition to that the readers can have a degree of trust and accuracy and how the scientific information is conveyed thanks to alison goldstein for providing uh all of the uh all of the edits to the books all the copy edits that is a very tedious and painstaking job one that i don't want but once again alison was able to raise the content of the book uh of the book as well and thanks to katherine etzel some something that doesn't go appreciated enough in books like this is the index i told katherine to put a very heavy hand on the index so people could go to the book and actually say i want to look up something about carbohydrate metabolism or any number of these very scientific topics and go directly to that page once again this book is meant to be a reference manual and a big part of any reference manual is having a high quality index to which you can go and reference

very specific things so thank you to katherine for putting that index together and last but not least abby hall who did all the illustrations and the styling of the book thank you for taking all these tedious scientific graphs and charts and forming it formatting them into something that is that is pleasing to the eye and that everybody can understand i'm immensely grateful to you abby for bringing the book really to life from a visual and palatable perspective all right that's it folks appreciate the heck out of all the listeners and as always we will see you out on the trails