Solving the Hydration Mystery in Ultrarunning with Meridith Cass of Nix Biosensors | Koopcast Episode 112

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and i am extremely excited about this podcast today and that is because it is with something that is brand spanking new on the podcast it is about a technology and a device that is just in its pre-order stage right now in fact the week that this podcast goes out the pre-orders will actually be going live and that is just sheer coincidence of me and the schedule on the podcast today i have the ceo of nix biosensors and that is meredith cass the long-time listeners of this podcast will know that one's hydration status and being able to have a solid hydration plan throughout the course of an ultra marathon is one of the biggest things that you can do for yourself to ensure your performance however getting to that answer getting to the answer of what i should be drinking and how much of what i should be drinking and how much should i be drinking across different temperature and intensity ranges is something of great mystery we've tried to

pin this answer down on a number of previous podcasts and you guys can go check out the one with andy blow in particular we mentioned him during this podcast but to do it in the field to send an athlete out into the field under a certain condition and have them track their sweat losses and the electrolyte composition within their sweat is something that is extremely problematic i've done that research and we put patches on people and taking patches off people and rung those patches out and analyzed them and put them on treadmills and measured the sweat coming off of them and rinsed them off and measured all the water and sweat that went in down into a drain and all of those solutions in my estimation are either archaic or too complicated for the average person and what meredith is trying to do with her company nix biosensors is is to try to make that relatable and in a format that the everyday consumer out there can actually get their hands off of where you out there everybody listening out there can simply put a patch on their arm go out and run and figure out how much you're sweating and what the electrolyte composition of that sweat is in order to inform your hydration plan for race day i met meredith in december of 2021 at the running event of all places the running event is a huge running industry trade show where they were doing their product launch there

and this i might add is an extremely bold move and we talk about that during the very beginning portions of this podcast now the entirety of this podcast might seem like a little bit of a shill you long-time listeners of the of this podcast know that it is not i have not and i did not and i will not take any sponsors for this podcast and it is precisely because i want to have conversations like this i want to have conversations with new people that are in the space in an unbiased format in a way where i don't feel tethered to the ultimate outcome of that conversation nor the endorsement or lack of endorsement of that particular product or method however i will say that if meredith's claims come to fruition and the and this product actually works as it is intended to work and as the initial data indicates it will i think that this one is a game changer and i do not say that a lot in fact more often than not i'm being very cynical about some of the products that are coming to to market where they promise way more than they actually deliver i do not think that that is going to be the case with with what nick's biosensors has but you guys can be the ultimate judge of that so here we go i'm getting right out of the way here's my conversation with meredith cass the ceo of nick's biosensors

so you got you guys launched at tr at the running event at the t re and i did not know that at the time bold move on your part that is not i see companies every once in a while go to the running event and launch their products but you have a a technology product that could go horrifically wrong if you launch it there and so before we get like too far into it because i think this will kind of start to paint the picture of just how you and i first met and interacted take the listeners through this launch at tre that you that you went through and what you were trying to communicate to the audience because it was really fun that's i just thought it was a cool scene well thank you no i mean first of all yeah it probably was a really bold move and i would say when we were planning it you know as as i'm sure people sort of gather about the world of startups is really nothing goes to plan right so you know we might have intended to to have our coming out party be in a smaller scale maybe a marathon expo over the fall or whatever the case may be but you know t re is just one of those events that's just pretty epic and you really just can't miss that opportunity so we just we kind of doubled down and put the pressure on ourselves to say let's just create the the most captivating activation we can with the limitations that we know are going to be placed upon us the first one being you know that we don't have a dry run somewhere else and the second one just being um placement you know as a brand new brand that's

never been to the running event before we don't get prime placement on the floor so we had to really think creatively about how are we going to drive people to the booth we knew we sat behind um sockany in particular who put up a big wall right in front of our booth um so we just you know we had to think about that and so we were pretty excited to be able to partner with um specifically with mike gordian and sally mccray to to really build awareness and um not just bring people to the booth so we had a chance to show them what we were working on but also to really illustrate exactly how the product works by having them do a live demo right there in the booth and this is this is why just to make the listeners appreciate this this kind of introduction this is why that's such a bold move because anything can happen your treadmill can break the sensors cannot work the athletes can fail you know that they're going all that hard but there's like all these multiple like small failure points and you're you mentioned that yeah you could have taken a small step and like dose tested it a little bit at a regional marathon expo but you went to the running event where all of the buyers are there all of the stores are there all the idiots like me are there trying to like figure the whole thing out and if you said if you set a bad impression you're now setting a bad impression across the entire ecosystem of yeah of all of runners right out of the gate and with something new that's super critical right i mean if you get it wrong right out of the gate it's like everybody just goes man i saw it at the running event it didn't work yeah no 100 and maybe that gives you a little insight into my personality i'm a very you know go big go home kind of person

so no i mean at the end of the day it ended up very much in our favor of course we had snafus we hope they were invisible to the attendees um and we suspect maybe they were if we're lucky but yeah we we had a really good show okay so you mentioned your go big or go home person and i want i want the listeners to kind of understand like who you are and who your team is before we we get into the the product and the use cases itself so i think i met all of them as well at the running who so who like who who who is this new company that is starting to take the starting to take the small part of the marketplace yeah i'll try not to bore anybody with kind of the founding story but i think it's relevant in sort of the direction that that we're thinking about for the technology which is that um i actually conceived of nix while i was in an entrepreneur in residence program which specifically means it was just me nobody else for the first 12 months while i was sort of ideating and figuring out um exactly what we wanted the company to be and of course at that point we is the royal we because i just said it was just me the first 12 months we're really sussing out like what's the pain point what are all the nuances of it what would a best fit engineered solution to that problem look like in all of its features all the way down to cost um and so personally it's sort of a little bit of soapbox material here but um i come from a long history of venture creation from the investor seat from the venture capital seat and i feel so strongly the right way to build any company regardless of what

you're doing is to figure out the problem you're solving make sure it's a meaningful problem for a large number of people and like i said just understand every nuance of that problem so that you can engineer the best fit solution because too many companies are doing the opposite which is let me see what cool stuff i can build which is a noble pursuit but then forcing it down someone's throat and trying to figure out how to sell it to them so so those first 12 months were really about what exactly is it that we're trying to build what does it need to look like because then that gave me the opportunity to figure out who is the team to help bring it to life um so now as as we sit today we made our um we made a hire the week of the running event by the way she started just that week so we are a team of seven we are very small and scrappy we're mostly based in the boston area um having spun out of harvard but um but getting a little more dispersed as we go so it's you know three on the commercial side three on the product side and me okay so fundamentally what problem are you trying to solve this is such a great question because as we think about where we are right now in the very early stages of our company in the very early stages of commercialization we are all about that sort of hydration coach in an endurance athlete's year so that's about how do we give them real-time data that's actually coming off their body not some generic calculation like calorimetry which which has limitations with respect to accuracy but how do we measure the sweat and the content of the sweat

coming off an endurance athlete's body and give them that information in the most seamless way presumably on some device they're already using like their garmin watch um so that they know exactly when what and how much to drink and build that hydration strategy that is the core of what we're doing and to that problem i can tell you as a practitioner in the field for the last 20 years that's an important problem to solve it's not it's also not a very easy one no and and so i think that before we we get into nick's specifically there are other ways to try to solve this problem yeah and they range from kind of what i use which are caveman ways caveman and cavewoman ways very simplistic very rudimentary very very generic to complicated and invasive and may not be relevant is the is the scope is the scope of the the current solutions that are out there and i and i mean that i mean that with all seriousness the people that are watching the youtube can see meredith nodding her head over the other over the other end because i've always viewed that as not acceptable in the endurance community and in the athletic community when i look at kind of how we have to do this it's i'm just like this is a terrible way to do it it's rife with air you're not getting the right results and you're and you're doing something where in many cases not all cases many cases the counsel that you're providing based on the information that you're getting is material to the

outcome and if you don't if you don't if you don't have the right information it's you're just kind of guessing that you get it right so let's lay the landscape of how one would solve this hydration coach in your ear problem before nick's entered the scene and i think that it's just a good setup to if i really wanted to do this right or at least try to do it right this is how i would go about it yeah absolutely and i feel like you frame that perfectly too because obviously i'm i'm biased in that we conceived of this solution but to hear someone else iterate the thoughts around like the way that the way that we have to solve it now or the methods that we have are legitimately archaic i mean that just sort of validates exactly what we're trying to do right so you know the way we look at it is um whether you are somebody at the front of the pack or the back of the pack and i should mention when we think about our for whom we solved this technology it's um endurance athletes across all sports running cycling tri um but also from the front of the pack to the back of the pack so we know that there are differences in some practices of how a really dedicated athlete especially you know an elite or sub-elite athlete might approach something like this but the reality is the tools are all the same and they are um thirst first and foremost right use what use what god gave us um and i'll sort of go through what these are and then the challenges as i see them the thirst is sort of first and foremost um second is you can absolutely do weigh-ins and do some understandings and calculations of what your

average sweat rate might be um and then the third one this one really cracks me up if you if you do any googling around hydration strategy you're going to get one of two things you're going to get a recommendation to look at your urine color which makes me laugh every time um or you're going to get some generic guideline and a representative guideline might say you know drink somewhere between 500 milliliters and 1.5 um liters per hour so the challenges with all of these first and foremost with thirst there's now a really robust body of literature out there that basically says if you're relying on thirst you're going to end up consuming about 50 of the fluids you've lost most of that literature comes from the soldier research center here in massachusetts um who studied that pretty extensively but um but that's the real challenge there thirst is going to get you 50 of the way there um the second one with weigh-ins is actually the gold standard of measuring sweat rate and fluid needs so it's it's actually pretty accurate the problem is it's completely useless when you're out in the field you're not going to be weighing yourself before and after a workout or a race um and it changes every day so you know your sweat rate intuitively we know your sweat rate's not the same when it's you know 30 degrees out in overcast like it is here in boston today versus you know 70 degrees and 80 humidity in bright sun somewhere else so you know that sweat rate is accurate but it only helps you on that one day and it's completely obsolete the next day urine color pretty obvious why that's

not useful in the field you're probably not urinating into something with a white background that you can even assess what the color of that urine is um not to mention usually that's a better measure of what your kidneys are doing than what your hydration status is and we can get into that but i always use the very glib example of if you're out drinking with your friends your urine is clear but it's not because you're well hydrated it's because of what your kidneys are being signaled to do in that moment in time um so i mean so those are some of the challenges right there um the last one on the guidelines is just illustrative obviously of massive variability among athletes and we see it um in terms of sweat rate and and composition of that sweat we see certain trends by age gender um fitness level or heat acclimatization but but by all means it's a massive distribution of sweat rate um that really there there just can't be a sort of one size fits all so that prompts people to the trial and error rate a lot of your listeners are a lot more experienced than than some of these sort of you know first time marathoner for example but um but even then i mean we see elite athletes getting it wrong all the time and you know i always think back to um we have relationship with chalene flanagan we think all the time to the 2016 trials in la where she barely made that third position and made the team so you know it happens it happens this sort of guessing game goes wrong regardless of where you sit in the back

it so you went through a lot of field activities and i'll throw up my anecdote right here where well you get the lab ones queued up in your head as well so we've done field ones where it kind of it's kind of a little bit of a high rate versus a field in the lab where we're using weight in the field and we've used this a lot in like team settings right so you have a team they go out and practice they're wearing they're wearing some sort of absorbent patch on their skin you weigh them before you weigh them afterwards that gives you the total amount of sweat loss and that's even problematic i hate to like trivialize it is that like that's not that's not an easy thing to that's not an easy thing easy thing to do when you want to get precise measurements but then you're collecting those patches and somehow extracting the sweat out of it and then analyzing that sweat with laboratory kind of great great equipment i remember when we do this with teams everybody would have their own like individual like tupperware that it would sit in and label then you know you'd bring it back to the lab and you either wring it out or like literally literally wring it out or like extract it somehow with a syringe but all very and that's not quote-unquote invasive but all just very archaic where i just look at it i'd get it to the end of the day and be like okay i've got some useful information here but there's got to be a better way there's just there's got to be a better way so we've also tried to do this in the lab which even gets more ridiculous in my opinion and you know the you know you know how it's traditionally done in the lab so how would we take some of these field studies and actually do it in a laboratory study where we're trying to determine sweat rate and sweat composition yeah and and some of the technologies you're referring to also you know the challenges like you

said is that you're not actually even getting moment by moment data right you're having to especially if you're using some of these absorbent patches you're having to wait maybe 15 30 minutes for there to be a volume of sweat collected that you can even wring out and put into the machine which for us is a benchtop osmometer that that you can even put you know you need 50 microliters for that you might need half an hour to to gather the amount of sweat to do that so i mean that was a big a big focus for us is how do we make sure again if we're thinking forward to the best fit solution we're thinking about something that's updating continuously in real time right so how do we bring some of those lab-based methods out to the field so that it's convenient for a user the answer is we use a device that's not just collecting all your sweat in one you know one bolus that you measure at the end it's that we are sampling it every single second to see how that's changing in real time because the reality is your workout is changing right the weather is changing over the course of your workout you might be going up the hill you might be especially if you're in training you might be changing your intensity or your pace throughout that workout so um so what we did was we tried to leverage um certainly the weigh-ins and things like that we use as our gold standard that's how we calibrate our algorithms but the intent was learning like we need to be making sort of these micro measurements every second and then reporting them back to the user in aggregate in a way that's actually going to be actionable for them okay so let's we're getting into the patch a little bit so let's

describe just try to try to describe what the patch visually looks like to this person who's not watching the youtube who's just listening to the podcast size scope how heavy it is where does it go like all those things just so we can kind of get a mental image of what's going on here and then we can kind of go into how it actually works yeah that's good to point so um and i will show it for those that are that are watching on the video but um we think about our platform and kind of three components two of them actually get paired together and worn on the body um the patch is the main piece that's an adhesive piece you literally peel a backing off and stick it to your arm it's about two inches or so in diameter two and a quarter inches um attached to that is a small um electronic component um which we call the pod so those literally pair together physically um there's a nice little click when those are paired together um and those get stuck directly on the bicep um there's a lot of reasons why we like the bicep instead of somewhere else on the body we'll come back to that but what's happening there is that patch is the piece that is collecting the sweat and the pod is providing just enough electronic power to make those readings and then send the data via bluetooth so together put together the pod is smaller than the patch together they're like i said about two and a quarter inches in diameter they weigh less than half an ounce very very lightweight and they're smaller than the garmin or at least the pod is much visual there very nice good visual with the garmin

so the uh i will say too the the adhesive on the patch is made of a kinesiology tape very similar to kt tape or rock tape if if some of you guys are using that um but really there's a sort of the reports that we get from testing is once you've put that on the body you kind of forget about it all together and then you'll get that data on your you know your phone if you're an athlete that does that more likely you're you're somebody that's using a garmin watch or if you're a cyclist you know maybe your bike computer um but again wanted to make it as unobtrusive as unobtrusive as possible and so it's measuring sweat throughout the course of an activity workout race or whatever yeah what's the range of that capability can you can it keep measuring it for 30 minutes for an hour for two hours we just mentioned some of the practical limitations of measuring things in the field like what are the practical limitations of continuously measuring it through the nix device yeah i mean i won't worry with sort of the scientific detail of how to solve that problem but many microfluidic devices do have sort of a time stamp on on the limitation of how long they're useful for because once that path is full right you know the the physics of it or that the fluid stops flowing through and so you stop getting readings um so we were very careful to design it so that it could be used in a way that the patch technically never expires there's no limit to how long it can be used um so the the sort of usage limiting factor is actually the battery um so we designed the battery to be capable of taking

readings and reporting readings for up to 24 hours that's what it's currently capable of and certainly there are ways to tune that up or down um as we potentially roll out future versions of this so if i want to go around the leadville char 100 which usually takes me about 20 hours on a good year i could wear the patch the whole time and theoretically get sweat sodium and sweat rate measurements the entire time that is correct and that was a very deliberate choice for us it's like we can't my 20 hour leadville marathon was a very deliberate yeah we cannot build i mean literally that's the proving ground right is we'll get into the physiology of of you know dehydration and why it's so much harder for longer distances but you know even though the the ultra marathoning field is is pretty small compared to endurance sports you know at large we absolutely knew we had to you know create a solution that was going to work for this segment well i was curious about that starting from when i walked up and saw a sally and mike wardian two great ambassadors at the at the running event and so my audience sometimes they kind of get lost in things the running has been is like 90 road in marathon and stuff like that and maybe 10 trail and ultra so to pick those two athletes very specifically for what you're doing is very telling but we're gonna we're gonna pause that for a second because we're still on we're still we're still on the device itself so whenever you come up with these things you've mentioned this earlier you have to measure it against a gold standard and there are going to be people out

there that will always say how in the world is this little tiny device capable of what these huge bench lab instruments are capable of that are you know 100 or 200 times bigger and 500 times more expensive and have to be handled with very you know delicate gloves quite literally so to speak how what is it measured against and what how would you kind of like uh describe the the validation i guess of the technology that you're using yeah really good questions these are so important ones and the reality is anybody that's taking a massive scale lab-based instrument and miniaturizing it to be worn on the body of course there's a little bit of a trade-off in accuracy right are we 100 accurate no of course we're not um and that was never the goal the goal is how do we take these really sort of validated time tested lab-based um you know practices and create a version of that that's that's practical and accessible and affordable um on the road so specifically what we did is i was sort of alluding earlier to a certain amount of fluid that needs to be collected to put that into a bench top osmometer that is the gold standard an osmometer by the way uses um freezing point depression to understand the electrolyte content of a fluid obviously in this case sweat um so that is the lab-based method at the

moment right you're you're collecting some volume of sweat you're you're squeezing it out into a little vial that you're putting into a bench top osmometer so instead of making you run with a bench top osmometer which is probably the size of a bread box um what we did was basically create um in a no visuals here on the podcast but we created a a flow path through this patch that has two electrodes one of them is stimulating an electrical signal and the other one is receiving it and in between is your sweat so what's happening is we're sending that signal through your sweat and the more electrolytes are in that sample between those two electrolytes um the better that electrical signal is conducted when the electrolyte content there is lower that signal is not conducted as well it is impeded more so based on the value between those two electrodes that we're measuring we can understand with actually with very good precision the electrolyte content between those two electrodes and then we use other methods we know exactly how far apart those electrodes are spaced we know exactly how much um signal we're sending in so when we get that impedance signal through the sweat that's how we understand exactly what the electrolyte content is for fluid losses let me put a pause on that so what you mean so electrolyte content being what right because there's a lot of electrolyte content and sweat let's make sure that we kind of run through the whole thing yeah exactly so what we're looking

at right now is what's referred to as osmolality so we are looking at the concentration of sweat in aggregate right now we don't have ion specificity so we're not going to be giving you how many milligrams of sodium versus potassium versus chloride that is something that will be a future feature for us um but right now it's looking at um electrolyte content as a whole in aggregate okay i think that's important for people to understand because yeah very unfortunately so and we can talk about why this is unfortunate too much too much detail gets put on some of the other electrolytes that are not all that meaningful but that's yeah that's a good point no it's a really good point um and you know just the realities of a tiny venture-backed company is we unfortunately we had to create a wish list of you know what makes the first cut and what are we going to roll out post post launch okay so let's go to the concept let's go to the to the volume then piece of it yeah getting into so that exact method i was just describing that gives us electrolyte content we do with those two electrodes we do that exact same process further down the flow path in the exact same patch so we actually have two pairs of these electrodes inside our patch um the reason doing it twice gives us fluid losses is that because in real time our algorithm is looking at the live data i'm sort of if anybody's watching the video i'm sort of showing what that data stream might look like it's a sine wave over time right there's a wave yeah you're not it seems counterintuitive but we're not just sweating at a flat electrolyte rate at all times it actually is fluctuating so as our sensor

is measuring those fluctuations at that first pair of electrodes and doing the exact same at that second pair of electrodes there's a delay as the sweat is moving from point a to point b from the first pair of electrodes to the second pair so what our algorithm is doing is it's identifying those local peaks and troughs in those in those waveforms and identifying what the time delay is from point a to point b and so by doing that our algorithm knows how quickly the sweat is moving through the system so i mentioned earlier that patch is just sitting on the bicep we have been very specific about knowing the surface area of the bicep that that our sensor is collecting sweat from there's a very specific opening in that um in that patch so basically that that time delay that i was just mentioning that's telling us the local sweat rate right there on the bicep it's just for that tiny footprint on the bicep so we have a whole nother set of algorithms and this is honestly this is the trickiest part whole nother set of algorithms that's extrapolating what's happening on the bicep to what's happening across the entire surface area of the body and the reason that one's so hard is because obviously we sweat very differently at different sites on the body and the the reason that i mentioned some of the more archaic uh ways of analyzing sweat uh and that that we've used over the years is just for what what you just mentioned because a lot of people are

going to think how indicative is my sweat rate across this area of my whole body and if you can imagine there has been i would call it copious amounts maybe somebody would not describe it as that much but i think it's copious amounts of research where they've just had patches everywhere have them on their shoulder have them on their bicep have them on their leg have them on their calf have them on the lower back on their upper back on their forehead but i don't know if forehead's actually one of them just making that part okay so there you go forehead's actually one of them i got that one right despite myself and and correlated all of those across large population sets yes there's intra-individual variability but but essentially your algorithms right are taking that well-established research and saying we know what the bicep is how does that translate into whole body sweat you're not just making it up you're using an established body of literature of what i would call i would say that that's a robust body of literature in my estimation i think so too i think so too and i think you know that's obviously partly why we leverage it it's also an opportunity for us to you know leverage what's already known right there there's certain economies of scale that we need to be considering as a startup as well that we don't have the opportunity to to completely reinvent that body of literature so why not why not leverage what these experts have already discovered um where you know we can come up with our own sort of nuanced innovations um without reinventing that piece that sort of local to full body extrapolation if that already exists in the public domain by all means we'll we'll leverage it absolutely so speaking of the public domain i'm going to put you on the

spot on the validation piece of this because i actually don't know if this is in the public domain is your validation work in the public domain yet it is not yet okay i didn't think i didn't think so okay how much of the curtain can you peel back on that because once again you've got a product people are trusting it that it's telling them exactly what's going on it's not in a magic black box or anything like that and just spitting out kind of random numbers and i know i have enough trust in you just in our few interactions that we've had to to ascertain that you have looked at what your sensors are spitting out compared to what the gold standard is so what can you tell the listeners about that even though it hasn't been put in the public domain yet yeah absolutely happy to share because it is so important so we think about that validation that body of our own internal validation in a few different ways the first one is that we actually break down each step of how our patch and our algorithms work and we validate each individual step so for example that first step of how do we know that whatever impedance signal we're getting correlates really well to the osmolality of you know the fluid or the sweat that's measured there so we will break down just that piece and validate just that piece which by the way is in the 99 range um then that second piece of how do we how do we make sure that the um there's a temperature correction piece in there as well right so if you're taking that measurement at 37 degrees versus 90 degrees um that measurement is actually it changes a little bit

because of the properties of that fluid expansion contraction and so on think back to you know chemistry 101 um so there are steps like that that we can isolate and test and all of those are in the 98 to 99 range which we're very very content with um broader more macro scale is where it gets harder so with fluid losses as we mentioned if we're thinking you know tally up the data that our our sensor is collecting tally up the fluid losses and the electrolyte losses over the course of a workout how do we validate that our total um electrolytes and and fluid ounces lost measures up with what actually happened we use some of those same lab-based methods that we talked about before so we will put somebody maybe it's in an environmental chamber or maybe it's just at room temperature but we do very carefully restrict fluid intake you know we sort of we restrict it to a time period where they're not using the restroom or doing any other activities that are going to change their weight um it is very laborious those research designs suck they suck oh it's horrible yeah it's horrible but it's so important and i'm sort of coming back around to how we then are planning on publicizing some of this information but it's so important that we do that to make sure that we're in a range of of accuracy that's going to be first of all helpful not hurtful because we'll get into this but you know if if there's a certain tolerance for our product of making sure that you know if we have any instances of inaccuracy how do

we ensure that an athlete's not going to get hurt right that's our number one priority um and then the third one is you know on-body electrolyte losses there's actually no way to do that on body the only way we can do that is and you were alluding to this earlier some of these crazy lab-based methods we have to literally do a full body wash down to wash all of the electrolytes off the surface of somebody's skin collect all of that in a drain in the floor and then measure that so so some of these lengths that we've gone to are are really quite detailed but i'll give you a little spoiler alert um we have not yet published this this data but for the first um validation study where i think that it was 76 subjects if i'm not mistaken um we found that our accuracy was 83 so to put some definition around what that means um if somebody lost you know 10 ounces we were within 83 accuracy of that number and the reason that's important for us first of all we we referenced earlier that drinking the thirst only gets you to about 50 so it was really important that we far exceeded the tools that athletes have available to them today but the second piece is you know thinking about what is that you know if it's 83 accurate what is that extra 17 leaving behind are we are we risking like i said earlier you know the safety of that athlete and the reality is the way that we did the analysis is that that 17 error if

that's what we want to call it um still kept athletes within one percent of their starting body mass and we can we can take a little sort of tangent here and talk about how we define dehydration but but basically what that means is we kept athletes if they followed our data we kept athletes within one percent of their starting body mass which is amazing i mean we couldn't have dreamt of results that good yeah and so i appreciate the candidness that you have with that because i think all too often when when devices uh come out they purport things that they are actually not either in terms of accuracy or the totality of what they are actually presenting and i just hope the listeners can appreciate a the multi-step part of it but be just being very honest about we realize that there's going to be some accuracy loss and is that accuracy loss tolerable in an athletic context and as long as i know that from as a once again i'm taking this information or an athletes are taking this information and saying yeah drink more drink less drink more stuff with electrolytes in it drink less stuff with electrolytes and it kind of comes down to that right if you can get it to the level of granularity that you need to present that advice good and you can get more widespread adoption great you've kind of solved you've kind of solved you've solved the problem there um so i i appreciate that candidness with uh what you're what you're gonna uh what you're gonna present that when is all that research due out can you give a

ballpark yeah so we're in the process of launching our new website um that's got a lot more content including a lot of white papers that we've written internally but we're also in this i mean we're sort of focused here right now on the endurance athlete and we don't you know i don't need to bore your listeners with kind of what our commercial path as a company looks like but we envision a path that expands from endurance you know from the endurance athlete to the team sport athlete to the tactical athlete in the context of military and then the industrial athlete which you know is anything from firefighting to construction working to agricultural so we have a whole sort of roadmap in front of us um that we need to consider as we think about our validation package and information that we put out there so we already have um certain pilot partnerships underway with groups across that whole spectrum um which are um in basically we'll be producing peer-reviewed literature that will be published more widely so the listeners of this podcast are going to know are you going to have a data set that's bigger than andy blows because he that's his claim to fame he's got the we both know andy he's a colleague of both of ours he's been on the podcast and i'll link i'll link that up in the show notes but his claim to fame is he has the biggest data set on this on this not in the same the exact same context that you have but from sodium composition and i i believe him you might exceed that because your stuff is more portable essentially well i i certainly think that when we really engage and and roll out our pre-sales and then certainly our commercial launch i mean the the limit to the amount

of data that we can collect is i mean there is no limit right that's that's the beauty of the way that we've designed the product is that we ship it to you you use it and it and it kind of goes forward so while andy who's wonderful and his team have had you know years of opportunity to collecting this this bullets of data um you know it's it's more on sort of a one-off perspective i mean our our initial packaging has four instance you know four patches four use cases right in that first package that becomes sort of automated so what i get excited about is that just the massive potential of that data that we can then back correlate to things like what was the temperature for that data set what was the humidity how fast were they running were they male or female the insights that we can pull out of that data set on the back end um you know once we have i mean i'll say right now we've got about 10 000 people on our pre-orders list that um there's 10 000 data points right there the package is 40 000 so you know that data that data explosion is very real throw the gauntlet down right out of the get-go you haven't you started shipping i love it i love it it's like inevitably what happens with that stuff and you know this better than i do right is when you get better when you when you get better uh or a wider and a more broad set of people using it you realize how much more individualized all of these different things that you're measuring are i mean anytime you've moved a data set from the n of 12 that you get in this typical sports science world to the n of

thousands or the n of tens of thousands that bell curve gets a little bit wider each time you get that each time you get that iteration and i think this is good this is going to be one of those um inevitably over the course of time you got there's we got time to figure that out though that's a lot of people a lot of people that go through exactly um okay let's circle back to the ultra running stuff yeah this is super curious for me and you can satiate my curiosity first and then we'll get to the the practical point of it second so i'm going at the running event i know it's a lot of road running nerds you know the carbon fiber shoes everywhere and you know 10 10 ounce handheld water bottles and that's kind of the that's kind of the scene there yeah you had two ultra runners in your booth at the running event running on a treadmill using your uh using the nix patches is that what you're officially calling them the nix patches i want to make sure i get the brand they're so new i don't even know what i'm talking about exactly yeah two ultra runners there specifically and yes mike and sally are great they're great ambassadors they're great humans they're great people but it's a very in my mind i'm going i'm switching from my coach hat to my marketing hat i view that as a deliberate choice by a new manufacturer to put on the treadmill to ultra runners in a road-centric environment why was that yeah i mean you know the the reality is just the very basics of sort of illustrating that if our technology and our product can work for sort of the the peak of the peak right the tip of that

pyramid if it can be deployed over a 24-hour period if it can handle the types of you know cumulative fluid losses and electrolytes that that an athlete of that caliber is is putting it through its paces then in theory it should work for any other athlete that follows behind them whether they're at a shorter distance or a slower pace or whatever the case may be so i mean it's always strategic when you're working with athletes to really almost illustrate these kind of these sort of edge cases if you will these extreme cases um to signal to the rest of the folks that you know it's probably going to work for their needs too you know you could have cajoled mike into doing a 24-hour treadmill run out there i'm sure oh he would have done it yeah he would have loved it he literally said like how many hours do you want us on the treadmill i said four and he said oh that's no problem can i get there before so i can get my workout in but here so so kind of reeling it back to the practical standpoint i think ultra marathon is your best target audience in terms of how much impact it can actually have and i've talked about this with a number of uh hydration experts on this podcast because you can get away with doing stupid things for yes one hour two hours three hours four hours maybe maybe maybe even five hours if the conditions are are correct but it's hard to do that in an ultra marathon situation you pay the penalty for failure quite dramatically so and we

see this you know you mentioned earlier you see this kind of lit you see this like littered across the competitive landscape where even professional athletes and elite athletes they screw this up and you know it can have horrific consequences from a performance perspective uh in in ultra running i think that that's your like market to figure it out first absolutely absolutely i mean that's the proving ground right like just this concept that um that i mean it exists at every distance but especially at ultra is you know every decision that you're making from a hydrating and fueling perspective from literally mile one has cumulative impact as you get further along right um i'm not an ultra marathoner full disclosure i am a very average marathoner i'm a four-hour marathoner total boston medal in the background i can see that you see that i can see how very well placed um but you know that that adage of like the decisions that you make in miles one through five this is a very sort of marathon centric concept but but is infinitely more true at the ultra distance is you know those decisions you're making in the first five miles have everything to do with how you're feeling and performing in the last five miles um and again it's just you know that's amplified tenfold when you're talking about you know 100 mile 150 mile races and longer 100 so how are you advising people actually use the product i think this might get to some brass tacks with athletes that are out there that are listening that are either thinking about just figuring this thing out for

themselves anyway right yeah i think i'm a salty sweater i always have you know these issues in long or hot races or whatever and some of the way that you recommend using this product it it obviously you know helps move the product but also it helps kind of stimulate people to think okay this is how i could potentially go go and solve this so somebody inquires to your sales team or somebody you know picks up a box of them we'll go over like how they're shipped and distributed and things like that like how are you advising that they actually use it to glean this information out of it yeah and this is one of the hardest parts right because we know there's going to be a little bit different usage patterns depending on sports depending on you know distance or talent level the baseline for us so that we can give some people some place to start from is actually really um analogous to fueling so what we sort of say is if you're turning in a workout that's you know in excess of let's say an hour you're you should be thinking more strategically about your hydration so what that looks like is if you're turning in any workout midweek long run whatever the case may be that's an hour or longer use a patch that can start to measure what's happening on that workout all that data by the way gets stored in the app and used for the future so even if you're only doing you know a 10 mile midweek run right not something crazy you know uh sort of high intensity or anything like that um every data point that you

use it for can help inform a future workout based on i think the part we haven't really gotten to here is that as we're capturing all that sweat profile information we're also capturing the environment that you were in when you produced that sweat profile so we're capturing temperature humidity wind speed cloud cover altitude um all of those metrics such that when you go for a future workout in similar conditions we're going to calculate that sweat rate and electrolyte loss rate for you on that future day so when you think about use cases there's kind of two two priorities first is um what are the types of runs where i need that data in real time and then also how do i continue to fill out my own personal data sort of profile my own sweat profile so that i'm feeding that future predictive model and the way the way i look at it as a coach is you're you're building a profile right you're building a profile in different mainly different temperature conditions maybe temperature and humidity if there's a certain use case and then maybe intensity on top of that that wouldn't be yeah i wouldn't say that's the most practical kind of use case but i personally i just do a 10 degree increments i figure that gives me enough granularity where i know what's going on and so four to six patches would be the perfect kind of use if i were to send that package out to an athlete like me buying it and sending it to one of my athletes which i do a lot with technology that's kind of how i would set it up i'd get you know four to six i'd send them out do them in these conditions we'd build the profile then we'd double check it you know across kind of the critical ones and just go from there yep and you nailed it

that's exactly how we package it it's four patches per pack um then again it's sort of built with somebody like me it probably only makes sense for me to use it on my long run because i'm not you know i'm not training for ultras so um so that that could be the base case is you're using it once a week on that long run but building up to i mean especially when we're thinking about our our cycling and triathlon folks as well i mean there may be workouts or bricks midweek too that makes sense so you know could be up to three four times per week yeah so how does it stack up to the gatorade patch which people are going to be familiar with i should have asked you this like two questions ago it totally escaped me but there there is a like a light what i would call light competitor and what i mean by that is is like physically at least it looks exactly the same it purports to do the exact same thing it's almost like garmin and suunto right or garmin and koros or whatever it's a smartwatch captures gps technology what are the differences between those two but this is something that's a little that's i'd say more early stage development right in terms of technology and things like that what's the differences between those two now that people are going to be familiar with with both products yeah absolutely and maybe i'll even start with the similarities i mean the the differences in the actual patches um are are probably not even readily apparent right they're both disposable patches that you stick to the body one time you know for gatorade on the forearm for us on the bicep um you know really seemingly similar use cases um where each of those patches is trying to do some

analytics um on the sweat as it's coming off the body which you know they're they're competitors that have not launched yet um that are still sort of academic stage that are trying to approach solving this problem in a totally different way but that right there is direct sweat sensing is uh is a very comparable approach but that's kind of where the the similarities end um on gatorade side there are no electronics which at first one first sort of blush may seem like a benefit but the the challenge there is that um then the data that you're getting is not continuous or real time for that matter so our our electronic component um does have the added benefit of measuring that sweat every second and sending that data to your garmin watch or your bike computer or or whatever device you're already measuring that workout on for gatorade you can only get that data at the end of your workout you finish that workout you scan it with your phone you know with the camera um on your phone and it's giving you cumulative um data you know throughout throughout that whole workout so we'll give you that cumulative data at the end but we're also giving it to you literally minute by minute or second by second while that workout is going on and sending you notifications in the interim to say as you set them you know tell me every time i've lost four ounces so i can drink those four ounces or however you want to interact with those notifications um the other big change you know as far as the real-time data which we offer is um there's not much of an opportunity for that predictive model in the gatorade platform they're not

tracking your historical data they're not correlating it with the environment um in a way that you can look and say all right well today i'm doing a workout and it's 70 degrees out or 50 humidity what is my sweat rate likely to be there's no recall through gatorade unless you are putting in the exact workout that you've done before in the exact conditions that you've recorded it before and there's no way to sort of visualize that so that's kind of one of the main differences there i mean you know to get to a technical level it is using different ip and stuff like that but um really it's the use case and then you know maybe the sort of uh sort of elephant in the room obviously is if you're using a gatorade product imagine what brand they might be trying to promote you to replenish with right so again from the beginning we've been really adamant that we are brand agnostic we don't care what it is that you're hydrating with we want to give you the data to make that selection and within so first off i appreciate your candor with that how material are those differences because we went through a couple we we went yeah we went through a couple scenarios of where even your own patch right has a level of inaccuracy associated with it as compared to the gold standard but i would call that an acceptable amount of inaccuracy for the use case that we're looking at right taking that a step in this compare and contrast how material are those actual differences to the end user yeah of you're

saying from the gatorade type exactly i mean i think they're massive and you know we don't have the opportunity of being internal employees at gatorade um by the way their their patch is actually made by somebody else so we don't have the opportunity to dive into their science and and see what their validation data looks like um what we certainly can surmise is that you know the the gatorade patches sensing method is built is built off of color metric dyes as opposed to any sort of electrochemical reading which is what ours is i mentioned those electrodes earlier so their technology is built off varying shades of purple to understand for example the electrolyte content in your sweat and that for that very reason that's why you can't just look with your own human eye at the gatorade patch and say i'm in such and such an electrolyte range that's why it has to be read at the end by the camera phone right it's it's looking at that sort of color color analysis so it you know in my opinion those color metric dyes um you almost think back to like you know first year chemistry or like eighth grade chemistry it's literally litmus paper that's exactly what i was just doing yeah yeah that's literally what it is it's lit it's litmus paper for your sweat which if you ask me is that really different than you know assessing the color of your urine not really it's kind of the same process it's a color chart so when i dug into that technology that is meredith that's the exact same thing that i did i thought back to my freshman year chemistry class and i'm some random titration

experiment and going could i like the color of this is what i'm determining the advice off of like do i do i want that to be the standard and yeah people are going to come up with analogies where that is actually the standard and things like that but personally i think in this use case it's it's not the way we should be going because there's better technology out there that's neither here nor there let's get to real-time data so you envision this from the onset as your hydration coach in your ear and i don't know what state the app is in right but when when athletes hear that they're like oh my gosh somebody's going to tell me drink now drink now drink now walk walk the users through how that advice is first generated and we talked about building the profile earlier and then obviously disseminated to the athlete and i realize that there's you know you've got product development that's looking out like 24 months by now but let's try to take a real practical approach like like here now how do you how are you how are you collecting that advice and then how are you ultimately disseminating it yeah and this is really the crux of it right this is the core of the value proposition and it's really been our north star from day one like everything we've heard from any athlete regardless of talent level gender distance has always been just tell me what to do and when to do it yeah so so that's how we built it so basically we talked about how that data is being generated it's getting you know transferred from the patch to um you know the phone the garmin watch whatever whatever device by computer um so then what's happening is it's literally giving you moment by moment updates in a

load losses and electrolyte losses throughout your workout that's the baseline right there but you can set a notification to also prompt you to drink and and with what um at intervals that you choose so my favorite one is based on time i would rather be told every 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever interval feels right to me let me know what my needs are in that cadence oh okay so it's like 15 minutes you've lost four ounces replaced four ounces with x right 15 minutes you've lost eight ounces replaced whatever it is whatever exactly oh that's cool shit that's good perhaps more popular is actually the volume based so i will send you a notification every time you've lost let's say four ounces again completely customizable if you want that five ten twelve whatever um but that one's really popular in the sense that you can just go about your workout completely tune out any of the the data but you will get feedback haptically on your watch or whatever the case may be to say okay you've crossed that four ounce threshold again go ahead and drink that four ounces whether that notification comes every four minutes or every 14 minutes has everything to do with how quickly you're sweating but you're getting that consistent notification i'd use that by the way this is why this whole thing is so intriguing if i had an athlete that was not great any anything but not great if i had athlete that's really good with their hydration i'd kind of leave them alone don't don't mess with it but if they're average or below

average which is more than half way more than half i would use it in just that fashion we're going to go out we're going to build your profile and then during the race we're going to put this thing in the air so you don't have to think about it because in ultra it's hard like yeah it's you get 10 hours into a race and you're all foggy and you know you're not you know it's hard it's hard to like figure out the fluid volume in your hydration pack or whatever you're using your bottles or whatever like that i think that that's the killer use case in my opinion and really if you think about it from a high performance standpoint breaking two projects right they're rolling up on a bike and drink this don't think about it just drink it they don't have the data they don't have the real-time data but they've used a predictive model to insert whatever they're trying to do fluid electrolytes energy kind of whatever it is it's the same thing but you're basing it off of what's going on in real time from a hydration exactly exactly and it's funny that you mentioned breaking two because we actually work with brad wilkins who is the physiologist on breaking two he's on our advisory board but it's that's exactly the the sort of design centric experience that we try to create for that athlete right no one's trying to do any head math nobody's trying to do any ratios or calculations when they're you know on the roads we're trying to make it easy um so but both of those use cases i just mentioned by the way really work for athletes that are carrying their fluids with them and that may not always be the case there may be athletes that are relying on aid stations or water stops hydration stops for those scenarios you use it exactly the way that you use any other data feature

on your garmin for example so you'd come up to that aid station you'd look at your watch and say all right i've cumulatively lost you know nine ounces whatever the case may be consume that we actually do have a feature on there that's optional where you can log what you've replenished so if you're somebody that carries fluids you drink that nine ounces at the aid station you hit a quick little you know like the lap function on your garmin same concept single button tap it will reset that back to zero for you so that when you get to the next aid station it's just what you've lost since the last time you replenished like really trying to make it foolproof that's rad so it it's garmin compatible now through garmin iq or that's right through garmin iq yeah yeah that's exactly that's so right so you get the data on your garmin on the phone anywhere else any of the any other watch compatibility um we did the apple watch integration is real simple we know that's a much you know less frequently use device among endurance athletes but it's an easy integration so we did we did include that one that's all we have for hardware integrations right now um little sneak peek is we are looking at other hardware integration partnerships to come um you know with folks and software ones as well like folks like wahoo and zwift and you know training peaks and strava these are all kind of part of the pipeline and they all make it really easy with uh with open apis yeah well it's like i said from the onset i think that you you're solving a real problem there that use case is one that hundreds

and thousands of athletes have gone through i come into an aid station i don't know how far behind i am on fluids am i supposed to drink all i can am i supposed to drink to thirst am i supposed to do whatever and everybody's trying to help and usually there's like five differences of opinion right there if you've got the gold standard a you know that you're going to perform better at the end of the day b you're less likely to make a critical mistake and in ultra we actually have to worry about that we have to worry about making people making critical mistakes and getting sent to the hospital or whatever right but see people don't appreciate how much the mental energy costs and this is when i used to have this debate with people about drinking to thirst or drinking on a schedule and it seemed like five or seven years ago people would still argue on the drinking to thirst peace just being efficacious in itself or more efficacious than itself versus drinking on some sort of schedule that you've that you've selectively uh designed now that that research is generally flushed out and those people have kind of quieted down the knock becomes it's too hard right it's too hard especially in ultra where the temperature changes a lot and your hydration needs change a lot to figure that out in real time takes a lot of mental energy and sometimes the mental energy isn't worth it but if you take that component out i think you've got a big advantage yeah no i'm glad that you said that because that that's also been an important feature from us from the beginning is how do we just literally automate this for people like take it out of the mental calculus that they're trying

to do to create you know especially on race day but in training too can you paint any other feedback from the users that you've had uh out there in the field like just so people who are listening can be like oh yeah this person experienced that i identify with it as well um oh gosh i mean we've heard such a range of feedback i mean everything from you know being able to you know sort of think about the patch as like a safety net that you know how many how many features do we think about of um impacting whether we have a really strong run or we have a bad run right it's there's hydration nutrition sleep fueling fitness i mean you know hydration as we know is is absolutely one of the most impactful so some of the feedback we've gotten is like the ability to to just slap a patch on get data on the device i'm already using and just take the hydration risk off the table um you know if we're doing our job right that's you know that's kind of the the baseline value proposition the simplicity of it right because i mean i so we talked about this at the running event so i recently released that book that i was talking about there and we use the standardized sweat test and things like that and yes it's only getting it's only getting you know total body water loss not the electrolyte composition at that state at that point but i think that that's the simplest thing and i bang my head against the friggin desk every time i try to get an athlete to do it and they they don't or they forget or they have their clothes on during one and not during the other or they're still holding their water bottle at the

end of the day it's just like oh my god or they used the restroom before they did the weight like whatever the case may be i mean no it's it's the simplicity of it i will say too we alluded to this earlier too is that um if we can i keep talking about fluid losses and electrolyte losses as the two main um data drivers and they are but the one that we create out of the ratio of the two of those is sweat composition so on average you know what is the electrolyte content of your sweat and of course again this this varies with every workout but if if that can be a key part of this profile as well and we can say you know your electrolyte loss is in the range of 32 milligrams per ounce and put it in a unit of measure that's actually usable right here in the u.s we think about fluids in ounces and and electrolytes in milligrams so if we make it something you can literally read off the package of your hydration brand of choice again we are agnostic you know it can help you figure out in this spectrum of like i think morton has something like 17 milligrams per ounce of electrolytes an element is like closer to 100 so if you know where you sit in that spectrum it can do two things it can help you pick the product that's best for you or we can help you mix you know how many packets of morton into how many ounces of water to create a beverage that's perfectly in sync with your sweat composition yeah the the listeners of the podcast uh will will remember the interview that i did with andy blow where his company precision hydration is using an at at home at rest type of way yeah to to manage

electrolyte or to to determine electrolyte composition and they're putting people in buckets right low medium high and i think they have like extra high now or something like that but your device can do the same thing and then you can go out into the commercial market space and say this product exactly with this electrolyte composition suits my needs and you're right it is a huge rain and almost nobody understands it right right and you know that's that's something that our commercial team is trying to think about too is like there really is a very wide range of of sort of sophistication and savvy with that data i imagine most of your listeners are probably on the upper end of that of really having dialed into hydration and nutrition um but there are a lot of folks that go out there and wing it and they they still do trial and error without a lot of you know really getting into the data of it so so we may have a little bit of work ahead of us to educate some of our users on you know when we say that you've lost 200 milligrams of electrolytes what does that mean exactly and what are you supposed to do about it yeah yeah i think that that's going to be the more illuminating piece of it is the matching the for on the on the user side of it is matching the product specifically to the electrolyte composition that's showing up on the patch i think that's cool okay how can people get a hold of this we've created like the least compelling sell ever because it was way too technical we don't have the set people appreciate it i told meredith at the running event it's like don't bring your sales people on because i'll tear them apart bring people who know what they're talking about

make sure it's practical make sure it's not too salesy you know let's talk about the holes and flaws and you know moles and hairs and wrinkles and things like that that are on products because they're everywhere that's right so where is it in the commercial space if somebody listening wanted to go and buy it right now and start dorking around with it trying to figure out their hydration strategy for their next ultra marathon how would they go about doing it yeah well it's it's well timed that we're looking at shipping finished product early this spring so just in time for training and spring racing season um but pre-orders are in fact open right now um so our website pre-orders.nixbiosensors.com um nix is spelled n-i-x um the that's open so anybody who's interested can go get in there we're not even taking payment information right now we'll do that when we ship finished product but um you know first and foremost this helps us understand what category of athletes is is really in highest demand for the product um but also it's more more of a functional piece for us it helps us understand what our orders to our contract manufacturers should look like as a brand new product a brand new you know product category there are no comps out there for us so this helps us really dial in what the demand is gonna look like i appreciate that and you don't want stuff sitting on shelves either that's the that's the other flaw that you could make that okay so i'll i'll put a link to that in the show notes if anybody out there is curious go and check it out i will put in pre-order an effort

of full disclosure where it says there's no comps i'm gonna pay full price i'm gonna probably ship a few to my athletes and see what the use cases are and things like that i really i really do honestly think that you solve a problem you do it in a way that works you're not overselling your stuff which irritates the bejesus out of me no and and in ultra very specifically i think this is this is a mission critical area to figure out hydration always comes first then nutrition comes second and if you can figure out the hydration part it almost always takes care of itself no i love that we love hearing from athletes too i will add that in there may be needs or features or idea and we're constantly soliciting feedback so there is a contact email address at the bottom of that web page that i just mentioned don't hesitate to reach out to us we'd love to hear from you awesome maritth well thanks for coming on the podcast other than your website nix hydration i always screw up people's websites hold on i just have it here nix biosensors there we go nix biosensors is there anywhere else where people can get a hold of you your team or your work or learn more about what you guys have cooking that's the best place there's contact information right there on the website that will get you directly to us as well okay sweet thanks for coming on the podcast i appreciate it good luck to you i hope to bring you back in two years once all the validation research comes out and we'll talk about that and then what iterations you have had over the product over that time frame that'd be awesome so good to see you jason thanks absolutely all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to meredith for coming on the podcast

today and i can't emphasize enough how excited i am for this market to come out in the marketplace and i am not one to get excited about these things uh but i've learned over the course of my coaching career that there are always companies that are going to come up out on the marketplace and some of them are going to make it and other ones are not and throughout all that experience i think i have a pretty good nose as to how to differentiate between those two groups and i think meredith and her team they are on to something it solves a very important question that we have in sports science and endurance sports and they also do it in a very practical way that everyday athletes can get their hands on so i'm excited to see what they do in the space i'm going to go on their pre-orders and order a couple batches and use them for myself and send them out to my athletes and see what they think whether or not you do it yourself or not you are going to have to be the ultimate determinant of that there are no discounts for you guys listening out there hashtag sorry not sorry about that i appreciate all of the listeners out there today if you like this podcast share it with your friends and your training buddies it helps out a tremendous amount to get the word out about this podcast i'm also very appreciative of when i get to meet people out at races and who recognize me just from talking to some stranger just through my voice and they get to come up and ask a follow-up question out in the real world i'm gonna be

at black canyons in just a few weeks and so if you are there come and hit me up i'll be by my adventure van i'd love to talk shop with you that is it for today appreciate the heck out of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you