CBD- Help or Hype? With Joanna Zeiger PhD and CEO of Canna Research Group and CTS Coach Corrine Malcolm⎮KoopCast Episode 11

what's going on trail runners how's your week going are you starting to ramp your training up that's what a lot of runners are doing right now they kind of went through the lottery season and they're starting to shake their race season out and you know that kind of lights a fire underneath everybody's butts and they start to ramp up their training and i bet as a byproduct of ramping that training up maybe you're a little bit sore maybe you're not recovering quite as well maybe your joints and muscles hurt and you start to look for an ergogenic aid to alleviate some of those aches and pains and maybe one of the things you've been thinking about because it seems like all your other friends are doing it is you reach for a cbd product they're everywhere they're tinctures or gels they're muscle rubs they're stuff that you can you know spray underneath your tongue whole different types of delivery systems and they seem to be coming more and more ubiquitous within not only trail running space but also in the endurance space as a whole i was recently at the running event in austin texas which is a big industry trade show and out on the showroom floor there were 11 by my count 11 companies that had cbd products and only nine companies nine that had gels and i thought to myself how in the world is the market for cbd products bigger than the market for

ubiquitous the ubiquitous and humble energy gel that we've used for decades and so as i was walking around the floor one of my friends said to me and she said hey do any of these products actually work and so i thought to myself i'm gonna go find that answer and so i did what i always do i go and i dig through a ton of research and i go and i contact the experts to get their opinion on it and one of the people that i just happened to talk to is on the podcast today her name is joanna ziggler and a lot of you ultra runners out there are not going to be familiar with who she is but if you've been following the sport of triathlon for any length of time you will surely recognize that name joanna was fourth at the olympic triathlon in the sydney olympics that's a heartbreaking place to be in but after sydney after 2000 2009 she won she won the 70.3 ironman world championships and had a successful athletic career not only in triathlon but also in marathon running and in swimming where she was a seven time u.s olympic trials qualifier across the sports of swimming triathlon and running let that sink in for a little bit but joanna's resume doesn't really stop at her athletic pursuits she has a PhD from john hopkins university where she studied genetic epidemiology and i can appreciate that having my own genetic degree how hard that must be and since then she's formed her own group called the

cannabis research group or canna research group and within that group they provide research consulting services education and patient services to the cannabis community and has become what amounts to domain expert for cannabis and its use in athletes and so i traveled up to joanna's home in boulder colorado and we sat down for discussion on how thc and how cbd products can be used within an athletic population as an ergogenic aid i also brought on my good friend and fellow cts coach corinne malcolm to play the role of i would say this the skeptic or the educated skeptic in this whole conversation just to provide a little bit of balance but i tell you what what we what we really found out is is that joanna's approach to this is quite pragmatic and practical and based in evidence and i think the listeners of this podcast will truly appreciate what she brings to the table and then what corinne and i can also bring to the table as coaches within the sport who are constantly having these questions kind of ask for us in terms of are cbd and or thc products useful in an athletic population uh in an effort or full disclosure i'm not sponsored by any cbd or cannabis related groups or any any sort of those companies so anything that i say here is you know my opinion and my opinion alone i am not a i am not a marijuana or cannabis or cbd user in any way shape

or form except for uh some of the things that we actually mentioned on the podcast some of my own trials there just to alleviate some health problems that i was having at the time but at the same time i'm not a hater and i realized that uh there are a lot of people that have found relief uh from these products and joanna is one of them and she tells us her personal story with uh using thc and cbd products that uh helped her alleviate a tremendous amount of pain that she was going through at the time and be able to uh live a normal life so i'm not a hater but i am a cautious skeptic on this role as is i'm sure a lot of you that are listening to this podcast so buckle up here we go with joanna ziggler and corinne malcolm talking about cbd thc and all things related cannabis joanna i've been familiar with your career since you were an olympian back in sydney in 2000 and then you won the 70.3 world championships in 2008 and then you were attempting to defend your world championship in 2009 and you had a very unfortunate crash during that race and then from from my perspective just from an outsider's perspective watching the sport of triathlon you kind of just disappeared and then reappeared in a different capacity and not an athlete capacity several several years later and i think let's kind of pick the story up there with

that crash in 2009 sure so um you know 2008 uh winning the the world championship title at 70.3 was a dream come true for me i'd always dreamed of winning a world championship and so that was really one of the pinnacles of my career um probably as almost as much of a highlight as competing in the olympics in 2009 when i went back to defend my title i felt like i was in very good shape my training had gone well i felt like my fitness was actually higher than it was the year before so i i had a pretty good hopes of being able to defend my title but when there's chaos chaos happens and that race was chaos uh the previous year they sent the women three minutes behind the men and we caught the backpack of uh the professional men and there was a little bit of interference of of the men's group with with the top ladies so somebody had the brilliant idea to send the women off first and i don't remember what the time gap was but we got caught on the bike and i was with a pack of i don't know maybe four women and julie dibbins was off the front and we got we got caught at the absolute worst spot on the course the most narrow spot and we were going very fast with you know i don't even remember how many men were in that group it was terrible and and you know you're in a draft pack it's a non-drafting race and we weren't really in a spot where you could drop out the back so finally we uh got around this sort of narrow section with a u-turn and i had to make a calculated decision do i leave the group with these women who are my competitors

and just let them go or do i stay in this draft pack and ultimately i made the decision to drop out the back so i let the pack go and i was by myself for quite some time and then got caught by the second pack of men and the second pack of men towed me towed me back up to those women i guess they had also gotten dropped from that group um and you know i'm trying to be legal but it's very difficult um it's narrow it's all the things and so now we're in a group again not as large and unwieldy as the one we'd been in and we went through an aid station around mile 45 and it was a very hot day and thinking about the run i wanted some cold water to cool myself off i always had a propensity for overheating so i went to grab a water bottle to get some cold water and the person who was handing me the water bottle did not let go of the water bottle he was kind of holding it from the center grabbing onto it so when i pulled his reaction was to pull back and so i um you're stealing my water bottle pretty much that's what happened but it was your water bottle but it was my water bottle and going at the speed i was going even though i slowed down and i'm on two wheels and you know he yanked and down i went i flipped over the front of my bike and broke my collarbone and i did um really severe damage to my rib cage the collarbone i had surgically repaired a few days later never a big deal still have the nifty hardware um the bigger issue was my rib cage i broke multiple ribs which they never actually were able to find on imaging um all of the fractures were found during surgical repairs and i did severe neuropathic damage to the intercostal nerves that run in between the ribs

they don't like to be stretched and because i fractured ribs and i tore ligaments and i tore intercostal muscle off the bone the scaffolding to protect the nerves was gone and so um you know about nine of those nerves got overstretched and so i have a condition called intercostal neuralgia which is nerve damage to those intercostal nerves and it's very painful and it affects a lot of things i get muscle spasms i have shortness of breath it affects my diaphragm um i get severe nausea so it causes a host of problems i've had a lot of surgeries over the years to correct it um but unfortunately the the pain is with me all day every day i tried to compete for one more year um because at that time they kept telling me oh well your ribs should be healed and again nothing showed up on imaging and i said well maybe they should be healed but they're not i still have pain something's wrong i did manage to win one race that year the boulder 70.3 um pretty much every other race i dropped out of because i get off the bike and i just was hurting too much to race uh and so i retired from triathlon uh in 2010 and i actually spent uh maybe five years six years um doing some competitive masters running and qualified for the olympic trials in 2012 and 2016 um in the marathon but all the while still trying to navigate this difficulty with pain and and uh also i had some other health issues that were recently diagnosed uh as another condition i deal with and you know what i was finding was that you know they just want to throw medicine at you you know here take this pain pill take this take that and none of it was really working and so my husband encouraged me to try

cannabis and i was very reluctant to do so for many reasons as a professional athlete cannabis was not legal during my time in any form those rules have changed um now cbd is legal and thc um you can have up to a certain threshold um the other reason why i felt a stigma was that i spent eight years at the university of colorado doing um drug abuse research in young adults and adolescents and marijuana is one of drugs that we looked at and i saw all the very bad things that happened and it just did not occur to me that there could be some medical use to cannabis the third thing was even though it was legal in colorado medically it was not yet legal recreationally and i was just too ashamed to ask my doctor for a prescription so when it became legal recreationally in 2014 one of those barriers got lifted and at that time my pain just became so unbearable that i wasn't sleeping so i marched into the dispensary and said give me something for pain and for sleep and i walked out with some products and uh got myself a little too high because they didn't tell me how to dose it properly um and so uh but during this you know sort of too high situation i did get some good sleep and so i um realized that there could probably be some efficacy for me once i figured out how to use it properly and so that's how i sort of got started with cannabis well one of the things that i that i've really appreciated appreciated about you and your story is you you've kind of come into this cannabis use from an aspect where a lot of other

people and a lot of other athletes have come from they've got some medical condition that they just can't figure out and they're literally kind of at the at their wits end and they're throwing stuff at a dartboard but what's unique about your situation is you have these two components of your educational background at the university of colorado where you're working in a you know where you're being educated for you know drug rehab and alcohol rehab and things like that but then also with your training over at john hopkins and you're able to like synergize those and make sense out of your anecdote which i think is which i think is really is unique in our kind of culture in the ultramarathon culture of anecdote where we tend to rely on what did this coach do and what did that athlete do and what did this athlete do you were able to take that and apply these pieces of education that you had into something that could be translated not only to you but also to other athletes and to other users well that's really sort of how my research journey started was because i did hear a lot of anecdotes of people using cannabis for various medical maladies and i was hearing a lot of really beneficial stories and people were you know oh you know it helped me with this and it helped me with that and but you know as a scientist anecdote really doesn't go very far it's a good place to start because if you hear a lot of people saying the same thing then you think wow there must be something there let's take a deeper look and so when i went to the literature to see well what does science say

there wasn't a lot so people say though there's no research in cannabis and that's not true there's not no research but there's not a lot of research because of the federal regulations it makes it difficult to do the gold standard of clinical trials but still people have been studying cannabis for a long time whether it's in animal models or doing observational studies and so i recognize this gap and as an epidemiologist who has studied cannabis so i'm a cannabis epidemiologist i realized i was in a position to help close that gap and and be able to do some studies to answer the questions that people have and so in 2018 i formed canna research group we're a very small but mighty group of of uh physicians and phds who are interested in learning about cannabis and doing outcome studies and uh hope you know hoping to answer some questions of benefits and adverse effects for different demographic groups that are using cannabis for various diseases well we're going to talk about some of those studies in just a little bit but before we get into that i mean both you and i can remember this as coloradans i've lived in colorado since 2001 so we i lived through the i guess the prohibition days right the pre the pre medical cannabis days and then when they opened up the medicinal laws and then from then they opened up the recreational laws as well and to to to your point when the medicinal laws were first opened up it really was the wild west i mean you had you had medicinal marijuana shops opened up on every corner

the medical network really didn't know how to how to deal with it the legislature didn't really know how to deal with it they didn't know how to like keep the controls on the different businesses and where all the medicine was going it wasn't tested it wasn't tested the quality and the the quality of the product who knows what you were actually getting and i want to get your perspective on seeing that entire arc from when that initially started in colorado and some of the early adopter states to kind of like where we are now you know people still refer to it as the wild west which is interesting because it has come so far but you know there there is a lot that needs to be done i mean the the whole aspect of of testing has really come a long way my husband in fact does it for a state regulated testing lab so if you buy cannabis at a dispensary then by definition it has to be tested somewhere for things like potency and for pesticides and mold and for other kinds of things so when you go to a dispensary you walk out with your product and it has a sticker on it that tells you what's in it so at least now you can be more comfortable knowing what you're getting that that it's going to be you know what you asked for yeah and to paint that picture a little bit i know you you chose to not partake in some of the early medicinal marijuana you know things that were going on in colorado because of the stigma i was in a really similar position with a completely different type of health issue that i was trying to deal with where i was trying

to clear up some neurological issues i was at my wits end and things like that and finally very very similar to how your husband convinced you my wife convinced me she's like you need you should try this like you need to get over it i'm a texan red state you know we were we grew up in the it's a gateway drug and all that kind of stuff and i was i was very reluctant to come into that process but i but i actually did and corinne who's on the other end of the line right now can can uh can profess to this but i do an inordinate amount of research whenever i jump into something like that and so i did that with just trying to find a physician that was like the first step i wanted to find a high quality physician that wouldn't just give me a medical card that would actually evaluate me and give me some guidance on the entire kind of on the entire process and so i spent maybe a couple of weeks doing research on just the physician side of it who can i trust i reached out to people i knew i you know called this person called that person or whatever and i finally settled on this group up in uh up up in denver and i i i went up to this group up in denver kind of expecting to have a normal completely normal kind of medical checkup and i and i walk in and it looked like a normal medical office and i check i check into my appointment and i meet the physician and i tell him my my list of symptoms and he says yep you qualify go see the

front desk and i'm like no no wait hold on it's like i i need some like counsel here on what type of product should i use what's the dosing like where you know where can i go like i don't even know what dispensary to go to and things like that it's like oh just go to the dispensaries they'll they'll they'll they'll tell you you know where to go so i was like okay so i go to the front desk and i'm asking i go to the front desk and the people there are very helpful and i said okay so what happens now because i i hadn't done any other research on what happens now i just did the research on who i need to see as a physician and this and i distinctly remember this this guy behind the counter he goes well i'll process this form and in a week you'll get your card and then you can get your weed bra that's exactly how it's not much better well and so still like that i know and so here i am as a as somebody who's trying to be educated and actually solve a medical condition and it fit every stereotype that i had going into the appointment and then i went to the dispensaries and that fit every stereotype that i had going into the dispensaries as well and my question for you and you've kind of somewhat answered it is how much has that changed not a whole lot unfortunately i went to get my i get a medical card now i have several qualifying conditions and the reason why i get a medical card even though it is legal recreationally is because the products on the medical side sometimes

are different you can get different formulations you can purchase um more thc at a given time um the ratios are different so i continue to get a card and and when i went to go renew my card last year i had that same experience the the doctor never looked up um because this was a renewal he just uh signed the paper and i left now at that point i didn't really need the guidance because i'm forging my own path but um there are very few i mean i think there are some now you know medical cannabis doctors that that can provide some information but for the most part it's just uh an assembly line people come in they get their box checked and they get their card you go to the dispensary a lot of times the bud tenders those are the people that help you behind the counter they don't have a lot of information for example a lot of bud tenders in colorado recommend pregnant women to use cannabis for their nausea where our studies show that that's a dangerous thing to do so you know one of the the purposes that we have in in uh in addition to the research that we're doing is hopefully to take the research that we have to put that into education so that people like you who are trying to solve a medical issue and need information on dosing and maybe frequency or type or whatever can get that information so so in 2020 it's still difficult i guess is is the picture that we're trying to paint here in 2020 it's still hard to get information and even when you're going even when you're trying to do it in a careful way and in a thoughtful way it's it's it's hard to find medical providers and then

dispensaries that will kind of take the time and care to to essentially do it right well it's difficult for a few reasons on the dispensary level i don't know how well the bud tenders are educated in you know actual you know science behind cannabis and what you should be using for which diseases the second problem is there isn't a lot of research anyway to direct that information so it's starting to come out and and some of the papers that you read now have some recommendations but the bud tenders aren't going to go to google scholar pub med to read these papers and right now there aren't very many like repositories of that kind of information the issue on the medical side is that doctors are still afraid to give that out because of the worry of losing their license i will tell you the group that really is on the forefront of being able to give the information are the cannabis nurses they seem to have banded together and put together some good programs and have a lot of information so if people are having trouble finding doctors that will provide them with the the cannabis nurses actually um are doing a very very good job okay so since it's hard to find information let's do that in this podcast all right so to start out with why don't you paint this overall arc from from an athletic perspective of what the value proposition is with cannabis and cbd to an athlete if an athlete is out there looking at i'm going to use this to manage pain to use it as an ergogenic aid and things like that what is the basic proposition that they're looking at well i think we should start from the

beginning and talk about cannabis and you have the cannabis plant and under that we have um what people you know cbd um so you've got um like the hemp plant which is very high in cbd and by definition has very very very low levels of thc i think it's less than 0.03 percent and that's hemp and that falls under the cannabis and we also have what we know as marijuana which is very high in thc and um some of the marijuana does not have cbd and some might have some cbd um and so the the cannabis itself the cannabinoids that we are most familiar with are thc that's the one that that is known to make you high and then there's cbd that's all the rage now and you can find it in everything from hamburgers to soda hamburgers seriously i haven't seen that one yeah they were that was like a whole gimmick that they were doing last year putting it in hamburgers so cbd is showing it's showing up in clothing you know cbd is everywhere and so that's sort of all the rage at this time but there are actually hundreds of cannabinoids um not just thc and cbd and um well why do they work well because we have receptors throughout our body in our brain and and in our bodies that that were put there because we actually make things endogenously that bind to those receptors but also you know when you um use the plant itself it also binds to those receptors so we have things in our body that bind to it but also cannabis can bind to it and so you know i think it's important to understand you know why it works is because you know we have receptors and and so when you're looking at well should i use thc or should

i use cbd when you look at where so thc binds to the what's called the cb1 receptor and cbd to the cb2 receptor and when you look at charts of where these receptors are in the body may actually help you um decide what's going to work better um so you know if you're looking at the gut and you look at the receptors there i think there's more cb2 so that's why cbd might work whereas if you're looking at neurological things in the brain where there's a lot of cb1 that's why thc might work better so you know you can't just go at it very haphazardly there is science behind trying to decide what to use so the first step would be trying to figure out what your ailment is right and figuring out what receptors are specific to that ailment right and there are lovely pictures online that you know if you type in cannabis receptors you'll find lovely you know diagrams where these are so it's pretty easy to find um but the other thing to understand is that there's um something called the entourage effect i love this term by the way yeah this is like one of my favorite terms in physiology because i feel like we're in the movie tombstone with like a posse behind us and we're all gonna like gang up on something yeah we're gonna gang up on the disease through the entourage effect i like that and what the entourage effect is is that it's the whole plant it's that it's all of the cannabinoids it's the terapines and other components of the plant that have the most effect and so when you try and isolate out various aspects of it it may not work as well okay okay so step number one like we mentioned we're trying we're basically looking at anatomy and where the receptors are from an anatomical standpoint right

and just sort of understanding the plant itself and not just gee i'm gonna use cbd because i want to feel good it's you know understanding you know um how it works and then deciding why are you using it you know just saying well i want to feel good is very nebulous and it's very hard to quantify and so you know are you using it because you have anxiety are you having trouble sleeping do you have a sore knee do you have osteoarthritis do you have migraines there are a whole bunch of reasons why people might want to start using cannabis figure out why okay let's come back to that why in a second because i think that there are a few we can probably narrow it down to maybe three three three more common reasons that athletes would want to use cbd or cannabis but before we get into that i want to i still want to talk about this kind of overall umbrella that the cb cbd industry is kind of fitting under with respect to uh with respect to being an ergogenic aid and to kind of illustrate this point i was recently at the running event in austin texas in december and it's a huge industry trade show all of the shoe manufacturers come out all the nutrition manufacturers come out all the different race organizers come out and things like that fill up the austin convention center and on their trade show floor this year were 11 different cbd companies touting their cbd products for athletes and specifically for runners there were nine different gel companies and i remember walking around the trade show floor

going around going there the market for cbd products cannot be bigger than the market for the ubiquitous gel which has been around for for for decades yet here's where we are and all of them purported that their products their host of products cured or alleviates six or seven or eight different things and when i see whenever i see a proposition like that take this and it reduces inflammation and it helps you sleep better and it'll improve your gut function and it'll increase you know your muscle recovery and it'll cure male pattern baldness and it'll make you smell better and you know there's like five or six or different things that one thing is responsible for my skeptical hat goes on it should and and it tells me thank thank you for validating that and it tells me that not all of those can be true what's your what is your take on that right now well my take is that all of those companies could get a letter from the fda telling them to back down because the fda is sending out letters to various cbd companies that are promoting their products to do what you just said that it's going to cure whatever but there is no research to substantiate to substantiate that so there haven't been clinical trials to see if cbd is going to cure male pattern baldness or that was a joke by the way i know it was but i don't know i like that joke so i'm

going to roll with it or you know whether cbd is really going to reduce inflammation there aren't studies to show that and so for these companies to then put that out there on their website or to tweet that out or use it in their social media in some way or put it on their packaging um that's a problem and the fda is starting to crack down on that um and you know that's why we're here we want to do some of these studies and i want to work with these companies and i have actually approached some of these companies to say hey let's study this and see what it's doing in athletes so that you can be ahead of the game and be able to make these claims because you've now had a third party look at what your product is doing rather than just you know pulling this out of the air so that you can make a sale yeah so i feel like i'm in in coops and the same like boda's coop oftentimes that i'm uh i'm an optimistic skeptic and my my job via be it writing or coaching i think puts me in that skeptical puts my skeptical hat on and i was telling coop um just the other day that i was pulling research um on this topic as as i do any topic and when i just use like google scholar so something that any anyone has access to on the first page of results when i type in cbd and athletic performance on the first page of results which is 10 or 15 articles or should be articles one of them was a peer-reviewed scientific journal article the other 9 to 14 were written for sites by phds or mds about cbd or about

cannabis um and that's really hard with my skeptical hat on trying to like find find the research and i know it's coming actually one of your research articles was pulled um that i pulled it when i was looking looking for stuff and so i know that there is research out there and that is particularly in clinical populations but when i look at it for these athletic claims i know that research is coming but in my mind it's just like in my eyes it's not there and that creates a lot of skepticism in me when i think about where am i going to put my dollars yeah i mean it is difficult and the reason why we decided to do a study in athletes to begin with was because of this proliferation of these companies coming into the market and saying well we're making cbd for athletes and my question was well who are the athletes that are using it is it helping you know why they're just putting it out there because they were getting on a bandwagon they put the cart before the horse basically is what happened interesting so okay so if an athlete is out there and they're they're looking at this landscape and let's say they've gone through they've gone through the the process of saying i want to try this out as an ergogenic aid out of all of the claims that are there and joanna you're more familiar with this than either corinna corinna and or ir out of all the claims that are out there which ones should the athletes or which ones can the athletes look at and go okay that's a that's a reasonable proposition for me to receive a benefit from um reduced anxiety is something that studies have

shown that cbd is useful for um but when you ask what dose should it be that's a little bit more nebulous um some of the studies that they and this isn't like pre-race anxiety they're looking at things like um performance anxiety before giving a talk and they'll give somebody a very high dose of cbd it could be a couple hundred milligrams of cbd before they that's a lot holy cow well but see it sounds like a lot to us because most of the dosing on these products is um you know five milligrams or ten milligrams so when you hear 200 milligrams your brain explodes because it sounds like so much but a lot of the studies that they're doing and things like inflammatory bowel disease or with um seizure disorders or anxiety they're actually using very very high doses i mean some of these studies could be using one or two milligrams per kilogram and so when you talk about taking five milligrams or 10 milligrams a day most people probably aren't even taking therapeutic doses of cbd okay so that's the first one anxiety what else that's um there are some uh early studies that show that cbd can be helpful for inflammatory bowel disease things like crohn's and colitis okay crohn's and colitis what about any of the it's going to reduce my joint inflammation it's going to help me recover about all anecdotal it's going to help me sleep better yep in our study that we did now this wasn't a clinical trial this was um survey based when we asked people you know do you cbd or do you use thc or do you use both

and um and athletes who used cbd only had the least benefit compared to the athletes who were using thc or thc and cbd so they had uh the least endorsement of things like improved sleep or decreased pain etc and i don't want to jump ahead perhaps but i feel like a lot of these studies it's probably talking mostly about oral ingestion either inhaled or in an oil but what about there's a huge market as well for topical or transdermal application of cbd and i've seen i've read some studies with you know with rat populations and that kind of thing but that's not exactly humans and i'm just really curious about is there any validity there given that it's a huge chunk of the market well that's very difficult because a lot of the topicals aren't actually being absorbed so it depends on the company it depends on the driver of of the topical um and so i do know that somebody that has done some independent testing this person makes a topical and his is very well absorbed but some of the competitors are not so you're basically putting the topical on and it's just there okay so here's the practical situation that i want to get your take on corinne you ran this year's western state or sorry 2019's western states 100 so you probably don't have this perspective because you zoomed through robinson flat at the 50k mark and we're not paying attention to this but i sat there for maybe

five or six hours and watched the vast majority of runners come through and get crewed by their friends and family and pacers and things like that and out of the how many runners are western states 360 some odd 69 369 runners may over 100 of them and this might match up with your research that you did over 100 of them out of that 369 we're using some product some some cbd product and it ran it it it encompassed the whole range the balms the tinctures the gels the sprays i didn't see anybody vote vape or smoke i saw some people that were crewing people that were smoking but that's another story people were putting it on their knees on their feet everywhere and i remember looking around going this is this is this is absurd there's there's too there's too much market hype here what what would you say to that situation am i am i interpreting that correct am i interpreting that in a like over exaggerated way well in the conclusion of one of the papers that we wrote you know we talked about how athletes are early adopters of things for performance and recovery yeah so that matches up with that notion of you know athletes looking for things to give them an edge and so cbd right now

it's it's readily available um it's you know it's easy to get it the topicals are easy to put on so you know i can see why athletes would want to use it because it's easy but that doesn't mean that it works doesn't mean that it doesn't work but it also doesn't mean that it does work yeah i was gonna say it's it's fascinating in doing some background research for this and for my own interest when you when i go to look for transdermal cbd what comes up primarily are patents so people working on this but not necessarily any any validity on its its application and i wonder too it's i mean i'll tell athletes all the time like placebo effects are real and they can be really positive but how much of this is just an expensive placebo like that's my biggest concern is my are my dollars still spent like better spent elsewhere well maybe i mean the placebo effect is not necessarily a bad thing i mean if you're buying cbd and you have pain in your knee and your knee pain goes away does it really matter if it was the cbd or the placebo effect your your pain is gone that's great that's like exactly like placebo like i am all for positive placebos um but like i know that that's a real at least the skeptical side of me knows that that's like a real possibility right and so but when you're talking about you know a little bit of knee pain versus somebody with a very serious disease those are going to be two very different things very 100 and so you know for the knee pain for the runner who wants to continue running and the placebo makes them better that's great but if you're somebody you know with inflammatory bowel disease and the medications you're taking aren't working and your

quality of life sucks the placebo effect is only to go so far and you want a product that's actually going to be healing but but what i'm what i'm hearing from you and you're a cannabis advocate can i characterize that correctly advocate might not be that you're a cannabis researcher but you are pro cannabis i um i am pro the truth okay you know i i i'm a cannabis user i think that if people want to use cannabis they should have access to it but i also know that it's not the panacea um there are a lot of benefits but there are also risks people end up in the emergency room because uh they have extreme vomiting or stomach pain it's called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome some people can get um psychotic as well so it you know it's not without risk um but i also but there's potential for a lot of benefits so i want to search for the answers so that people can use it safely and effectively but let's come back to the we want to figure out what the answers are because i know that's something that you're also very passionate about why don't we switch gears a little bit and go into some of the research that you did with the with the peace study and i want to see if this kind of lines up with some of karen and i's experience with uh uh with what we've seen out in the field karen you want to chime in really quick yeah i'm just and i think this will tie into kind of where you're where you're going is that what i'm hearing is that there is at least with your with your study which we're about to jump into that the the group of users who only use cbd saw the least benefit and

so we're in this really interesting conundrum all of a sudden where we can legally use cbd as much as we want essentially in competition out of competition but maybe thc or thc in combination with cbd has much greater benefits but then at least at the elite level where you're being drug tested that becomes more complicated and so trying to navigate that for an athlete i think becomes really tricky and really interesting and i think that's kind of where hopefully the research will help us dissect that yes and talking about being an advocate i am definitely an advocate of thc being taken off the banned list um i don't think it should be a thrustral drug i don't think it should be illegal in uh in competition maybe for certain sports where there could be a danger involved um maybe for those sports uh it could be banned but overall i think it should just be taken off the list so let's walk through that history a little bit because some of the listeners are not going to be familiar with it so as you mentioned earlier thc and cbd were banned by wada in all forms with zero tolerance meaning if you had any of it in your bloodstream that that constituted a positive test when was it that cbd came off of the banned list i actually don't know okay it came off the banned list at some point that's fine they raised the thc threshold from zero to 50 nanograms which is still pretty pretty light i will i would categorize as okay they most recently raised that threshold again from 50 to 150 nanograms can you i think they actually raised it again oh they did i do i think

don't quote for 2020 i i but i somebody did tell me now it's 180 okay i don't know for certain okay nobody's gonna know what that means right so and and i can't even describe what that means um that the threshold for occupational drug testing is much lower it's usually 34 is what i've seen most common so it's but what does that mean does that mean it's it's that you took an edible of 20 milligrams a night before does it mean that you smoked a week before that's unanswerable because everybody metabolizes it differently and so there really is no way to say to somebody well you'll be safe if you stop using it before you get tested for x amount or if you only use a couple milligrams you'll be fine that there is there is no way to define that because everybody is so different and so if somebody is being drug tested um they just should not be using thc because you know at some point they could have a positive now i know that there are a lot of athletes who are using thc and we're not seeing as many positives as there are people who are using it so certainly there are athletes that are taking that risk but it is a risk yeah the the orientation of of i have a little bit of insight into this and susada is based in colorado springs and we have a lot of mutual friends there but the but the and susada is not the one who came up with this policy this is wada by the way but they obviously have to work hand in hand wada is trying to thread this very fine needle where they don't want to catch people that are using marijuana recreationally and try to prohibit it in competition now that that

that that threading of that needle is quite difficult as you mentioned because the metabolism between individuals is different just like any other threshold drug by the way that's not unique to that's not unique to thc where people metabolize drugs differently that's any drug anywhere it doesn't matter whether it's on the wada list or not and i should also say i do think that there's some component of exercise and dehydration that also might change that threshold and if you haven't consumed thc in quite some time i mean this is just a theory i have read a few papers that that also speak to this but i i think it could just release it into your bloodstream as well yeah exercise one interesting thing that's happening in drug testing right now is the tests are getting so precise some of the previous thresholds are getting like recalibrated to a certain extent and especially the zero tolerance drugs and we see this in like the mixed martial arts setting a lot where previously undetectable levels of things are now being detected for whatever reason that's a that's a whole whole other story but but suffice to say i like your position that you are an advocate that you think thc should be removed from the banned list correct okay so let's let's corinne go ahead i was gonna say just that would be akin to like alcohol alcohol is banned but only with specific sports where it'd be a danger things like archery shooting uh right i think driving and sailing all have alcohol listed as banned substances as opposed to any other sport and then i will say too um you can buy

obviously it's not going to tell you what you're testing at but you can buy a thc like at home test kit like a 15 pack for 15 on amazon so if you're really concerned you you can probably do some self-experimentation as well yes somebody uh i was talking about this subject with uh i won't reveal his or her name but somebody somebody in the know in the anti-doping community and that person told me that anybody who is ever worried about testing positive for thc and competition should should do exactly that not not that you should rely on it but it could give you a decent gauge anyway um that's just another anecdotal story let's let's kind of get back to brass tacks here so we want to talk about the study that uh that you did the peace study why don't you take the listeners through what that study is and then we can go over some of the key findings of it sure so in uh september of 2018 uh canna research group initiated the athlete peace survey peace stands for pain exercise and cannabis experience i love that by the way i love the fact that that you made the acronym something that was kind of like cleverly related to marijuana use no thank you we're actually initiating um peace studies in other groups um so we're going to be kind of using that whole notion of pain exercise and cannabis for other disease groups so um hopefully next month we're going to initiate uh a peace study in allergic and asthmatic individuals okay so uh so that was the acronym we chose and uh what we were trying to do with the study was basically find out you know what percentage

of athletes um are using cannabis and when i say athlete it was very loosely defined um we didn't care how long you've been an athlete we didn't really care what sport you were doing we didn't care how good you are at your sport because we asked about all of that in our questionnaire um the criteria though was that you had to be over 21 because that's a legal age to purchase cannabis uh in states where it's legal i mean i guess some kids can get um uh can get medical for various things but you know these were adult athletes so we chose 21 as our lower age limit no upper age limit we used social media for recruiting um as well as email blasts uh that were put out by some coaches um and we ended up with uh how many people took the survey i think about 1160 i think took the survey uh and we found that 26 percent of the athletes who took our survey um responded yes to the question have you used cannabis and that was thc and or cbd in the last two weeks interesting and and so did you get into are they using it in an athletic context versus a recreational context so we specifically asked if they were using it for um medical or recreational purposes um and then we also had a checklist of benefits that they might have felt and we also had a checklist of adverse effects they might have had and we did ask about improved performance or decreased performance okay so this is a this is a it's a it's a

it's a self-respondent type of study you went out and you found these people they self-selected themselves as athletes and they went through the questionnaire and answered it what are the like the key find what are the key pieces of data that you're taking away from this um well so you asked whether we asked uh they were using it recreationally or not and so i'm going to read you some of the statistics that we found uh so about 33 said that they were using it medically about 29 said they were using it recreationally and 38 said they were using it both medically and recreationally so it's interesting people really are differentiating for their purpose of use um when we talk about which cannabinoid are people using um 20 said that they use thc um almost 34 said they use cbd and 46 said they use both thc and cbd and when you look at the age breakdown um athletes over 40 primarily were the ones that were using cbd only and they are the ones who are also using it medically huh that's a staggering i mean to me that's a staggering percentage did that did that seem staggering to you or were you just kind of like yeah this makes sense which percentage the any any all of them like i would i would expect and this is why i'm not in this area i would expect all those to be at least half of what you just reported so that that more people would be using cbd than what we said no just everything everything could just cut it in half okay um you know i don't really know what i expected because a lot of this was exploratory most of the studies that have been done in athletes have been

done in adolescent athletes looking at cannabis use disorder um and uh been done in university or elite athletes again also use looking at um you know disordered use and not looking at it in the way that we are so i really had no context to put this into huh interesting so you've got this you've got this data set now of basically how how many and what types of cannabis is being used amongst an athletic population within that athletic population where does the research go from here well i mean there are a lot of things that we could do to hone in more on some of this information uh we don't have information on how many milligrams of cbd or thc or combo that people are using we don't know the ratios that people are using both are they using a one-to-one or a five-to-one very difficult to get that information people just don't know when you ask somebody you know well how much cbd are you using they'll say oh i'm using you know three drops or i'm using an entire dropper full and then i'll say well what how much is that oh i have no idea and so some of it comes from the fact that there's um the labeling is not the same across companies there's no standardization a lot of the labeling is difficult to understand so that you really don't know what a dropper full is um some of it is that people just don't read it they just say okay i'm gonna take a few drops in the morning maybe i'll take a couple drops at night and then the same thing for those ratios they just don't know if it's a one-to-one or a five-to-one and if you're smoking it or vaping it again it becomes very difficult to quantify how

many milligrams you're using so you know what's in a puff so that's why it became difficult why we decided not to hone in on that we didn't want to get people confused so needless to say there's a dose response relationship that is completely unknown from the consumer side of it meaning how much how what doses are consumers taking just fundamentally nor is there a dose response relationship in terms of x amount of cbd with this type of thc ratio does this in the body neither one of those seem like they're very well known it's difficult there are some studies now that are coming out um where they're getting some of this information and um you know there are some apps that people use where they can track their use so let's say that you're using cannabis for something like osteoarthritis um if you have the wherewithal to track your use all the time you can log into the app and say you know i used xyz product and um it had this much in it or the app knows and then you say you took it and it made me feel like this and then you can aggregate the data over all the people that use the app and you can come up with you know some conclusions um there are some um dispensaries that are kind of like conglomerates so they they have you know lots of dispensaries and again they track their patients and so you can get some information from that as well um it's still new not a lot of publications can't really derive conclusions yet well i so both of you and i are training peaks users corinne's training peaks user

as well maybe we can get training peaks to include it as a custom metric or something like that that would be awesome so training peaks if you're listening if you want to fund a study um i'll i'll pull it off for you dirk was on one of my very early podcasts and i've known him for many many many years and i can put a good i can put a good word in with him maybe we can get it in beta somehow well i mean i think that'd be great you know because everybody wants these answers and you know like i mentioned you know um a few minutes ago about the fda cracking down on these companies that are making claims because they're unsubstantiated because the research isn't out there but then when you go to these companies and say well i can do research for you they run the other direction seriously so there's this conundrum of the the data needs to be there in order to make the claims but nobody seems to want to pay to get the data so it's uh it's sort of a difficulty see so this is this has always been one of my issues with any new ergogenic aid whether it's in the nutrition space supplement space or device space that i have is i i put and this is just a personal thing i give the company two years to produce the data meaning if you come out with something that has some sort of here's your favorite word corinne bio plausible mechanism of action oh good i like that if you have if you have if you have an ergogenic aid that is somehow bio plausible you're allowed to go into the market and say this is how we think it works but my standard is you get two years

to produce some type of research to back those initial claims up after those two years i don't give you a pass anymore and i just that's what i'm having a hard time with the cbd companies is they've had that they've had that length of time and not a lot has been produced yeah it's it's a problem wow interesting um okay so you mentioned we don't have a lot of answers but we but but i can still give some advice okay that's what that's exactly where i was going to go we don't have a lot of answers so let's say you're in the position an athlete comes up to you and hey i have chronic tendinopathy i can't fix it i don't want to take a lot of opioids i've been through physical therapy i've been to the i've been in orthopedic setting this is an avenue that i want to try to get to to to get control over this type of tendinopathy and that would be a common i would say a that's as a coach that's a common question that i get asked how would you go about advising that type of athlete well i think it'd be a few things uh one is determining whether the athlete is open to using thc or if they only want to use cbd okay uh let's say let's say the answer to that is yes that they want to use both yeah they're they're into the entourage effect i just wanted to use that term they're into the entourage effect so the very first thing is to understand that in the world of cannabis that there is a mantra and it's start low go slow so you want to start at the lowest dose and then work your way up slowly so you may not have an effect at the

beginning um as long as you're not having adverse effects with small doses then you can work your way up slowly um so let's start with well which product do i use because it's hard to know which product to use and i'm not going to tell anybody which product to use what i'm going to tell people is that do your homework there are independent testers like consumer labs and some universities and you can do a search online independent testing of cannabis or independent testing of cbd and these companies will go buy things off the shelf and they will test it to make sure that it actually has mostly they do this with cbd because if you're purchasing something with thc you're buying it at a dispensary and if you're buying a dispensary at least in colorado and i believe this to be true for other states that it's been tested by some third party um you know government regulated lab so that's less of an issue um when you're looking at thc because it's been like my husband's lab you know they do this testing and you walk out of the dispensary and you know cbd you can buy it online you can buy it at cvs you can buy it at ideal market it doesn't go through the same rigorous testing so the first thing you want to know is that you are purchasing from a reputable company that is either transparent about um testing and they put a certificate of analysis on their website or that one of these third party testers has sort of given it a gold stamp and so that would be the first thing is that you want to purchase a product that you know has cbd in it because a very staggering percentage of these companies are selling what they call cbd and they may not actually have cbd in it at

all um it could actually have thc in it which is a problem for people who are getting drug tested sometimes they have other things in there that's not even mentioned um like melatonin and other fillers so if you're purchasing cbd not from a dispensary make sure it's coming from somewhere reputable and do you so i know you're not you're not you're not going to tell an athlete or a client what specific type of product to go to but can you at least counsel them on what the reputable companies are or do you take a hands-off approach and say you do your research well i mean for a specific person i will um i wouldn't feel comfortable doing that on a podcast because i don't want it to look like i'm endorsing a company which you know i don't want to do i told i totally appreciate that and just to just to shamelessly plug one of the aspects of this podcast is i do not take any sponsorships for it and that's part of the reason is just because of that is because i want to be able to talk about products and things like that in a in just a free-flowing fashion so i appreciate where you're going from there so let's so you mentioned this certificate analysis what about the the length of time that the company has been in business is that any indicator that they're going to have a product that has in it what it says on the label not necessarily not necessarily yeah so it's really just coming from doing some homework to and there are reputable companies out there and there's more than one so you know they're they're not a needle in a right so you know you will have some choices

all right so that's the first thing is to make sure that you're purchasing your cannabis from or your cbd your cbd or your cannabis um from or marijuana i should say it's all cannabis from somewhere reputable then you have to decide um what route of administration do you want um do you want a topical do you want an oil do you want to spray do you want to vape it do you want to smoke it um so there are a lot of ways that you can actually consume uh cannabis so that's the next thing that somebody needs to decide do any of those i know you're i'm going to try to pin you down a little bit as much as i can and you can feel free to tell me to shove it i'm not going to get offended are are any of those in your opinion better routes of administration than others they're all different and everybody's going to respond differently i've tried them all um as an asthmatic i don't smoke um i mean i have in the past and it just destroys my lungs that's not a route of administration that i personally use um vaping um i on occasion will vape now there's been this whole vaping crisis oh gosh and that's been very difficult and um most of the products that people have had this lung disease from are coming from illegally purchased um off the street um vape um again so you want to make sure that you're getting it from a reputable place uh dispensary um the reason why i personally vape on very rare occasion is that the onset of action is very quick so that you you take a hit of a vape um it works fast and when i have severe pain or if my diaphragm

is in spasm so much i'm hiccuping i can't wait for an edible to work um so if you need instantaneous relief a vape is very good um if you use like an edible it's going to have a much longer onset of action so it could take 45 minutes to uh over an hour but then it's going to last much longer as well so i will use an edible before i go to bed um and that way it gets me through most of the night like things like tinctures somewhere in between you know they don't take as long to work but again the uh it won't last as long either but even in our like narrow i find this fascinating even in the narrow use case of i have a tendinopathy just say it's patellar tendonitis or something like that you wouldn't necessarily directly go to oh let's get you on a thc and cbd topical because it's going to be the closest route of administration to that source of pain you would still say let's try a few of these different routes of administration and see what works i mean if you're talking just about a tendinopathy i would probably start with a topical okay um again from a reputable company that you know it's going to be well absorbed um but that that would be a good place to start in the in the results of our study i mean topicals worked well for muscle pain so or tendon pain you know that kind of pain so it is a good place to start and anecdotally even though we don't like anecdote but anecdotally people seem to respond well to topicals for that kind of pain okay so we've got these first two steps find the reputable company and then figure out the route of administration what's next uh dosing dosing okay let's go over dosing and i think

this is a good place to further reinforce the entourage effect with with a thc and cbd ratio so let's talk about the fact that where we started and that's that most athletes are using cbd and cbd is legal so if you're going to use just cbd by itself you know most of the time you'll probably start with maybe five milligrams and you're gonna you know maybe work your way up and again i should state talk to a doctor i'm just gonna give that caveat even though doctors don't know anything and or they may be reluctant it's not that they don't say anything that they don't know anything but a lot of doctors may not know something but really if you do have concerns or if you're on a lot of medications you want to make sure that you don't have drug drug interactions you do speak to a medical professional um if you have concerns so i'm gonna offer that that caveat um but um you know uh there was a paper that was put out where they did give some recommendations about where to start and so with cbd they recommend starting at five milligrams and then adding like maybe two and a half to five milligrams every few days until you get to a therapeutic dose meaning a therapeutic dose where you feel better for the thing that you're treating so you've gotten like i mentioned earlier in the podcast define what you're treating um so here we're treating a tendinopathy um and let's say your topical didn't work so now you're going to some kind of oral administration you might want to start with five milligrams work your way up so you're looking at the range of products let's say you've determined it's a tincture you're looking at the range of products and you'd say pick the one that has the least amount

start there see how you feel dose up titrate up from there so it's not that you're picking the product that has the least amount um you're just taking the least amount of that product so you could still buy a bottle of cbd that has 500 milligrams of it and you want to figure out you know how do i get five milligrams out of this 500 milligram bottle okay and this is why it becomes very difficult you have to do some math and that's why when you ask people you know how much you're taking you know there's some bottles that have 250 and there's some that have a thousand and so there's just no consistency but you want to start with maybe five and work your way up slowly until you get to a dose that you're like okay i feel better maybe you never get to that dose and so if that happens and let's say you get to 100 milligrams of cbd you're like man i still just feel terrible that's when you want to think about adding some thc okay i i okay so now i'm understanding the order so you're you're either recommending you're just saying most athletes are going to start with cbd only they're going to get to a certain point and maybe it's the upper end of whatever the recommended dosage is and if they're still not having in relief that's when you would recommend to add in some thc to that to the mix there well some people might feel comfortable starting off with a cbd thc combo and so you skip that whole cbd step but but because you know we're talking about what's legal for wada and cbd is legal that would be the natural place to start but some people may not be uh fearful of being drug tested and maybe they've already tried cbd maybe they like thc maybe they know it makes them sleep

better but for those who are starting with cbd only that's where you'd start so don't put the whole patch on all at once right so so then you would add and again um you would add thc maybe one milligram at a time so very very small amounts compared to the cbd amounts yeah um so that then you'd have a ratio with a lot of cbd and a little bit of thc and that's where the edibles are kind of nice because you can cut them up into small pieces and you know work it down to one or two milligrams which you can add in or if you already know gee you know a 21 ratio works well 20 being the higher amount of cbd a lot of these products already come in these ratios so that you don't have to sit around and mix and match and so you know i've tried all sorts of ratios from one to one to 20 to one and for me i find that a five to one ratio uh more cbd than thc um something that i can microdose throughout the day i cut into small pieces um helps me with nausea helps with my appetite um helps with some spasms and i just take that throughout the day um at night i use a an edible just straight up thc i think this would be a good place to interject why having a ratio that has more cbd to thc the consumer is going to have a lesser chance of actually experiencing any sort of psychoactive type of event so why don't you go over why that's the case and what's happening neurologically there so what happens is when you add cbd into thc cbd kind of takes away that high because it loosely binds to the same receptor and

um and again because everybody's metabolism is very different um like some people do very well on a one-to-one ratio so equal amounts uh for me it still makes me feel a little high and i can't get my work done um even at a two-to-one i don't like it so much but a five-to-one is that sweet spot but everybody's so different so my five-to-one could be somebody else's 20-to-one so you know it's going to take a little bit of experimentation to figure out what works best is is um is when people go to the hospital or people have some sort of adverse effect from taking too much thc in the edible crisis here in colorado is a great example of that where we have all these people that come in from out of state they want to participate in the recreational marijuana and they go find an edible and they don't realize that it's going to take you know 40 or 60 minutes to actually have have an effect and so they overdose they get admitted to the hospital is it still the case where they're using where they're treating that with cbd to take away the high is that still a like a plausible way to treat that condition i mean i think that some people try to do that i'm not really sure once you get into the situation where you're so bad you're in the emergency room you're screwed um i'm not really sure you know what they're doing i've heard that like you know with this cannabis hyperemesis the one where you're vomiting they say that hot baths seem to bring that down or some other kinds of things um so once you get into that situation um you're it's difficult you don't know if it's going to work it's difficult to get out of that yeah okay that's how they diagnose that in in like an er setting if

someone comes in and they say that the only thing that makes them better is a hot shower we're like oh okay this is this is hyperemesis from from thc consumption but it's one of the only indicators but joanna to one of your points earlier a lot of a lot of a big reason that we don't know what the correct treatment for that is is because we can't do research on it and it's difficult and that's a difficult study to do too because you know you're not going to give people hyperemesis so now you're kind of trying to figure out you know epidemiologically what are the characteristics that are similar among people that are coming in and why are they why do they have a propensity for this okay let um i want to talk about just for a little bit about some sociological aspects of this because there's still stigma and i would say the stigma is heightened in the athletic community around cannabis use and in the the trail and ultra running community there's actually kind of two polarized parts of the fence on this it's almost like colorado springs where we have two very polarized political affiliations but we have we have a section of trail runners that they are openly they openly admit that they use cannabis they like getting high and going running out on the trails that's just part of our that's just part of our culture and then you have a certain section of the population of the athletic population and trail running population that carry that carries with them a stigma that this is that this is wrong that it's a it's a gateway drug it's a schedule you know it's a schedule one drug it's still illegal in

a lot of states and i want you to kind of like talk about that a little bit because you went through that personally but how have you seen that change in athletic populations over the last few years now that more and more states are legalizing this i mean there will always be people who think that cannabis is a nefarious drug and nobody should be using it and you'll not change those people's minds and that's fine not everybody has to be on board with it um but it definitely um the stigma is much less than when i first started using cannabis when people would say oh you're a stoner now and you know say all sorts of things that i was like all right you know that's fine but i'm not um so yes there's been a shift um i think there will always be people who just are anti-cannabis not everybody has to be on board with it yeah okay that's fair enough um i'm gonna ask you one of my favorite questions that i have with all the guests and corinne i want you to load up a question as well while i'm thinking while i'm thinking about this but you're you're you're kind of in a situation where you're you're helping to pioneer the research if you could wave a magic wand and fast forward 20 years from now accomplish everything that you want to accomplish right now in terms of cannabis research what would that look like um personalized cannabis medicine okay and what does that mean we know the dosing we know for for individuals for individuals so individuals so somebody go ahead sorry yeah so that if somebody walks in um because cannabis you know all drugs are metabolized differently everybody has different

responses to medications um some people have adverse effects to statins while other people it works well for them but i think cannabis is even heightened more and so my ultimate goal would be to figure out you know so you're trying to treat this disease and you have this profile this is what you should be taking how long is it realistically going to take to get there a long time a long time 50 years no no i don't think it that long because they're already doing they're already doing this kind of thing um with other medications so that you can do gene testing to find out if you're going to be a responder or a higher low metabolizer so i don't think we're so far from it corinne what do you want joanna to find out in the next 20 years i mean i think that like so that's that's very much like the the medical and clinical side of things and i'm just really interested in to see where this is going to go in the athletic sphere be it changes to wada and usada testing changes to general stigma um are we going to the backpedal in order to move forward since there's a lot of stuff on the market now that we don't necessarily have validity for like that like that to me is super fascinating do you have any final words for us for the listeners out there don't be afraid if one thing doesn't work to try something else just because you've tried a product and it wasn't useful doesn't mean that there's something out there that's going to be better for you and the other thing is don't put the burden of the world on the shoulders of cannabis because it isn't the be all end all um you know i'm a i'm a cannabis researcher i think it has a lot of utility

medically um when i started using cannabis i thought well gee i'm going to be able to get off all these other medications i'm on and i was very disappointed when i couldn't i'm like i still need some pain medicine and i still need muscle relaxers now and again and and it didn't solve the world's problems it made uh life a lot better for me it improved my quality of life but it wasn't the be all end all that um it was purported to be by the anecdotal stories i heard and i went to a talk and i heard uh one of the very knowledgeable cannabis doctors address this very issue and he's like it's not a failing of cannabis it's just that you can't expect this one thing to do everything and so people shouldn't think that okay well i'm going to start using cannabis and now i'm going to be this great athlete and i'm going to not have aches and pains and i'm going to be able to perform at this level that's unbelievable none of those things are probably going to happen um because you know it you still have to uh train hard you have to be smart you have to get good sleep you have to eat well using cannabis isn't going to be a band-aid for other mistakes listen to that people and this is why i wanted to talk to you about this because i knew you would come to this with a personal anecdotal story research and science to back it up but also the pragmatism to realize that it's not a panacea for everything and i just i just i can't tell you how much i appreciate that perspective particularly in this day and age where everybody is searching for the magic solution and cannabis is certainly not it

and it can but it can be a solution and we're probably a little bit away from figuring out how to use it more precisely exactly well thank you for coming on corinne thanks thanks for thanks for being our reasonable skeptic today yeah thanks for having me i think it's a super interesting area and i think we're going to see i mean we're already seeing a lot of growth and i think we're going to see a lot more growth um in the coming years so it's good to be in the know yeah well thank you joanna before we sign off where can people find you and find more about your research uh you can find me at joanna-zyger.com and if you want to learn about my research uh canna research group.net thank you very much you guys will see everybody out on the trails all right thank you all right ultra runners what'd you think i tell you what uh that conversation with joanna and corinne was a whole lot more forthcoming and frank than i really thought it was going to be really appreciate uh joanna coming up on the podcast uh her time and expertise is just absolutely invaluable if you do have a second go ahead and hit her up on social media or you can go visit the canna research group you just google it on the web pretty easy to find they're doing a ton of great research in this area which is pretty brand spanking new there's not a lot of research uh in this area as we alluded to earlier thanks again to corinne for playing the role of reasonable skeptic

i always appreciate her looking up the research and fact finding uh for us whether we're doing an article or a podcast and she's actually helping uh do a little bit of research and writing on the new book uh that i'm working on uh and last but not least you guys tis the season to start to get ready for training and if you think that coaching is something that would help your training out for your goals this summer go ahead and hit us up at train right.com you can use the promo code KoopCast in all caps and i will waive your registration fee that's right i'll waive your registration fee for any new athletes hit us up if corinne or any one of our other fantastic coaches which are going to be coming up on the podcast uh in the next couple of weeks are good fits for you we would love to bring you on board and i'd love to see you out on the trails and out on the races until you until then you guys and out on the trails and out on the trails you