What Physiology Matters for Ultramarathon Performance with Frederic Sabater Pastor PhD | Koopcast Episode 130

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we start to uncover some answers to a question that i very first asked when i started working with ultra marathon runners in the early 2000s and that i've wanted to find answers to ever since and that is what physiological traits matter the most in trail and ultra marathon performance the reason that this question is so incredibly important is because as coaches and you guys out there in the audience as athletes you guys can push and pull on any type of physiology that you want to you have an unlimited number of arrows in your training quiver you can choose to focus on vo2 max you can choose to focus on aerobic base building and a whole host of activities however some of those physiological aspects that you choose to develop are going to inevitably matter more or less when it comes to ultra marathon performance if we take the classic construction of marathon performance there are three key variables that matter that's one's vo2 max the fraction that that somebody can sustain the

fraction of that vo2 max that somebody can sustain and their cost of running otherwise known as running economy and you can push and pull with training intervention with training interventions on these variables in order to maximize marathon performance however at the ultra marathon distance i have contended for a long period of time that those three variables may not be as tightly correlated with performance as they are at the marathon distance so inner frederick saboteur pastor who just published a article in the international journal of sports physiology and performance titled performance determinants in trail running races of different distances where he started to unpack this incredibly important question of what physiological parameters actually matter at different ultra marathon distances and he did it in quite a novel way in one that i really appreciate from a research setup i have wanted to have conversations like this for a very very very long time and unfortunately so it's kind of left me making a lot of educated guesses research like this turn those educated guesses into better educated guesses and ultimately it ends up serving the athlete the best because we can focus on training interventions that matter more at the ultra marathon distance and we can forego training interventions that might not matter as much so with that as a little bit of a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation

all about what physiology matters and what physiology might not matter at the ultra marathon distance do you have a heart out do you have a time you have to leave by no no absolutely not i have dinner at eight here so in three hours yeah don't don't say that man because then we go down some rabbit hole i've had some epic ones with people i have no time limit either but for me uh yeah absolutely where spanish are not to be late to please all right permission for the podcast to go for three hours then all right that's a good lead-in man we'll see how we'll see what time frame we hit uh we hit here um so thanks for joining me i really appreciate it um i have to tell you right out of the gate man when you're when i started seeing some of this research pop up in this area you know i've been i've been coaching for a long time and it was one of those things where i said like finally like finally we can start to wrestle around with this concept in trail and ultra running that will lead us to an answer that says these are the physiological things that matter and these are the physiological things that that that don't and to kind of like set that up just a little bit before we get into your background um one of the very first things that i started doing when i started working with ultra marathons ultra marathoners in the early 2000s was look for stuff like this because as you're aware of we we had a plethora of research in in cycling and in marathon running and also in triathlon

that could kind of like peel apart those physiological determinants of performance but it really never extended beyond you know iron man actually was the best analog that i could you know that i could kind of use and it's always been really impactful from a coaching perspective because you can choose to push and pull on any number of things right you have an unlimited number of resources at your fingertips to put athletes through and what you do ultimately makes an impact on their physiology but you're kind of guessing on this matters more than this and i want to do this you know disproportionately compared to this thing and i need to focus on you know aerobic base or speed or neuromuscular control or kind of whatever and sometimes these physiological determinants can kind of serve as guideposts for how the overall like macro periodization works so but there's none of that in ultra marathon so it's kind of like guessing right which you know i think if if all the coaches were to kind of like be honest with themselves that's what they do a lot when they're thinking about how to plan their workouts it's a lot of educated guessing and sometimes you can put a lot of horsepower behind that educated guess if it's there and then oftentimes when it's not there you're kind of just using your own like instincts and and part of that instinctual process is is looking at and theorizing what the demands of the event are and then trying to come up with training interventions that will ready the athlete for those

uh for those demands so when your piece of research came out i was like i wish i had this like 20 years ago when i first started coaching it would add just a little bit of clarity i know we've got a long way to go but just a little bit of clarity to that initial process so thank you 20 years later if you were born 20 years early earlier you could help my career out a lot more but um before before we get into it too much uh like let's uh let's make yourself familiar to the audience here why don't you tell tell the audience a little bit about yourself what you do and then the lab that you work in as well okay so first of all i am frederick uh sabater pastor those are spanish uh like frederick in valencian actually and then my two last names so um yeah i am a spanish researcher right now working in the university jean monet in in saint etienne france under the supervision of professor guillemme who who has been a past guest of this podcast right and yeah so after doing my undergrad in in spain the university of valencia i went to calgary to do my master's in kinesiology which was supposed to be mostly applied physiology so i learned a lot about like that applied physiology and how to apply the science to training and then after that wanting to come back to europe and my supervisor guillemme yet he was coming back from the university of calgary to europe and he invited me to come here

and do a PhD with him so uh that's a little bit of like my background story as how i got here and now i finished my PhD but i'm still working as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab and my the main focus of the lab i would say is fatigue and some people were more work more on fatigue in like let's say clinical populations different like disease like there has been work done on like fatigue and cancer fatigue and multiple sclerosis so that multiple disease and then there's another side that is like either like the pure science of fatigue the basic science of fatigue so what is really happening in the physiology inside the muscle without any application and it's a little bit that way how i think because of that and the experience of guillemme as an ultramarathon runner that they realized well ultramarathon is a perfect model for fatigue because you get people really fatigued so so my part like i work on fatigue as well but not as much like the neuromuscular aspect of fatigue but more like i would say integrative like the title of my thesis was performance and fatigue in in running and i focus mostly on trail running and ultramarathon running so yeah my main focus has been what are the performance factors uh for especially running i'm interested in all endurance sports but especially running and then uh how do those change after fatigue after fatigue and exercise that these endurance exercise

so what i want to know right out of the gate so your supervisor was gi who's been on this podcast before he also made some contributions to uh uh to to my audio book his his model and i'm emphasizing the word model intentionally here his theoretical model i should i should actually use that word intentionally as well his theoretical model of the performance determinants in ultramarathon running when it came out that was one of the first blueprints that we actually had but it was really him just kind of using like theory and a little bit of science of what he knew about fatigue and things like that and it became this really complex model but the thing that struck that struck me about it was just in fact that complexity where we're used to we'll talk about this during the kind of meet a podcast we're used to a very simplistic model in more of a road running or a marathon type of fashion but i wanted but what i really want to know is more of a from a cheeky perspective is is since he was your supervisor and came up with this theoretical model how much did he start pushing you down this road of actually doing like the science behind it because you know theoretical models are only kind of as good as the as the as the as the research will ultimately prove them to be true or false and so it just became one of those things where i'm like yes we're actually finding some things behind this theoretical model that that guy actually that guy actually came up with probably 12 years ago now yeah so like i wouldn't say that there was like that specific push there for like oh yeah let's try to find these things like he has

always been it's always been like part of the work of the lab and but i think actually that the last work on ultra marathon that they had done it was before guy went to canada it was when he was still in france last time so i think the last UTMB study they did was in 2012 and there i guess i think calgary was more lab-based studies they did lots of stuff on more specific things like for example downhill running themselves like that so and how does that affect fatigue but they are always by necessity more short-term studies but then like i guess that when i came back i don't remember any kind of like pushing for that like let's say that i was always interested and i think a little bit the same of what you were saying before that like what does really matter for this and like that like ironman triathlon might be the best model that there is for ultra endurance exercise and this is ultra endurance but the winner they finish in like now under eight hours so like i mean it is ultra endurance but if you ask he he would say that ultra endurance in running is after 100 kilometers more or less that before that it's not really ultra like sometimes i think about ultra with i don't know if like i would consider two types of ultra like you go overnight and you are losing sleep as well so all of that stuff like has never been said before yeah and for me when thinking about it theoretically or people were asking me for advice it was like yeah but what does really matter being here well i've said this for a long long time and i think your research is starting to actually tease this out your your thesis work is

starting to tease this out a lot the word ultra marathon and the fact that it encompasses such a wide duration and also types of activities everything from a flat road 50k which would be classified as an ultra marathon to something like the tour de giont right which is a 330k mountainous run you know around the ousta valley in in italy the fact that we're lumping all of those into like the same kind of event discipline really does this effort that you're trying to unwind and then you're trying to unpack it really does a disservice simply because that label is so it's too broad right it's just too broad of a label and we don't do that at different disciplines right we don't call a marathon an ultra 10k or an ultra road race or something like that like we we have very specific uh names for these different distance disciplines and ultra is just a really a really really big one so maybe it's in the eye of the beholder where that line of demarcation is but needless to say um like i said i'm just really grateful that we're starting to unpack this and we're starting to unpack it in a way that that delineates the different quote-unquote ultra disciplines because i do believe that that that the that the physiological determinants or what can determine success are different between those and that we can use some of that information to train athletes appropriately so let's get into it man you can start wherever you want to start with this this is your paper i've got i'll have a link to it uh and all the relevant

information in in the show notes i i know it's a lot but i'll provide a little bit of framework for it i think the most logical way to start is is what we think about performance at the marathon distance and then we can kind of like take that to how you explored how that's different from an ultra marathon perspective so i'll turn the floor over to you to start to start unwinding that okay yeah so then i think it's a good way to start uh the in the marathon distance or really in like in endurance running uh in general so like it would be similar for half marathon uh the speed at which we run which determines the performance it's determined by three main factors and those three main factors explain a lot of the performance in normal conditions so those three factors are the vo2 max which i guess your audience is uh already in front of but like how much oxygen you can like your body can consume like the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can consume and use to generate energy aerobically the fraction of that vo2 max that can be sustained so if there are two people that have the same vo2 max if one can sustain 90 of that vo2 max that person will go faster than someone who can sustain only 80 and then uh with those two uh the other modifier the other factor is the cost of running or generally known as running economy which is similar to like the the gas economy of a of a car like the less

oxygen or the less energy that you use to cover a certain distance or with a certain energy how much distance you can you can you can run so like will be equivalent to the miles per gallon for you in the in the united states that yeah the lower it is the better uh the better speed you can do for a given for a given oxygen consumption or for a given energy consumption so those are the three main factors they have been studied unknown for a very long time and like if you look at papers from the 70s there's a paper i think it's from 1977 in which like they study uh like some very good north american runners like steve prefontaine and frank shorter are both subjects in that study and those are the this is the data they are reporting like what is steve prefontaine's vo2 max what is the running economy of frank shorter taking into account that his vo2 max was very low and like in that paper already they they are talking about what maybe frank shorter that had a much lower vo2 max and steve prefontaine was able to like have very close performances to him in short distances and be a very good marathon runner because his running economy was very good he used very little energy compared to the other runners so those are also the ones that have been used to model performance like the first theoretical idea that the marathon could be running to in under two hours was based on taking those very good

elite numbers and say okay yeah if we get the person with the best vo2 max that has been measured with the first and we give that person the best running economy which in theory is humanly possible and we put that for and we put that person also the best fractional utilization they should be able to sustain this speed and therefore run this time in the marathon and that would be under two hours so that's it in the up to the marathon at least it seems to be relatively straightforward right so then uh what happens is that in my research what i wanted to look at and i know that your podcast is more like an ultra marathon podcast but and i think that this is maybe like maybe it's up i'm wrong here but seeing like the main difference between marathon and ultra marathon i think it's more of a north american way of seeing it whereas we in europe sometimes we see it more as like a road or mountain running yeah yeah we have more short running more short trail running races like sky running and that sort of stuff right so and i have never done an ultra marathon myself but when i have done trail running races they have always been on the shorter side but then like a big part of this interest was like yeah what happens with trail running so starting with only trail running not just the distance like is it the same and what happens in trail running and it just happens that i would say most of the more more popular races in in ultra marathon are trail running races as well uh in trail running they're like there are uphills and downhills for example so if

there are uphills and downhills like will strength have a bigger role to play and there be all these other things and then there has been some research coming up in like maybe during the last 15 years uh talking about this there was a recent review by the wall um that uh reviewed papers in short trail running races i think the longest one in that paper was about marathon distance but don't quote me on that and and yeah like they still saw that basically what the big picture seems to be that the things that matter for road running races or marathon races also matter for trail running but how important they are is not clear right so i would say basically that like we could say it's an aerobic sport so the aerobic part of fitness will be important but how important yeah this is the question that is i guess starting i wouldn't even i wouldn't even say starting to be answered but more starting to be asked yeah yeah in their research now so so what did you do with your particular paper because you had a really interesting design to it that i think it it kind of teases out a lot of the questions that you get once you start to actually do the research so kind of go through that a little bit because i want the i want the listeners to

appreciate the design that you actually deployed for this particular project so this paper was part of a much bigger project there have been i don't remember how many now but maybe 10 papers out of this project mine is the one that focuses on performance but some other people focus on fatigue for example but what it was like a very very big project that was done in the UTMB the ultra tandem trial to online race in 2019 so with like in collaboration with the organization and that like with the organizers and with the the i think it's the national ski and mountaineering school where the mountain guides and the ski guides train in france they're in chamonix and we had our lab set up there and what we were doing was comparing what happens to several things in my case it's going to be performance determinants and also running economy but for the purposes of this performance determinants across three different races i mean three different blocks of distances there were actually five races so as your listeners may know the UTMB is like one event that lasts for a week with many different races and there are like shorts races like the occ they're like the mcc and the occ which are 40 and 55 kilometers and then there is the ccc that is 100 kilometers and then there are the very long races the tds and the UTMB which are 145 and 170 kilometers and i don't know if we need translation to miles but basically they will go from 25

miles to 106 miles the races so having these differences like basically this was a good opportunity because we could get people that were going to run that were already not already signed up to participate in these races and like we measured all of them in the lab beforehand and then what we did was tell them like go run your race to the best performance that you can do and then in the end we will check all of those things that we measured before how they compare to to your performance on race day so then what we did was we blocked the races we took short short races so 40 and 55 and then the 100 kilometer race was another block that we got that would be like the medium distance and then the long races which are sorry which are the 145 and 170 kilometers the genius in this if i can kind of like wind it back a little bit because i don't mind saying this is genius i know that's kind of hard for hard for you to say you're a part of it but seriously the genius in this is is you're taking different race distances and different race durations that have roughly the same kind of environmental profile so they're roughly at the same temperature roughly at the same elevation roughly at the same elevation gain elevation loss for the races roughly the same elevation change per mile like that like not that they're exactly the same

but they're all using the UTMB you know trail more or less to the to to to to a certain extent and so in that way you're not comparing apples and oranges right you're comparing apples and apples just across different distances and so i'll give an i'll kind of give an example that helped the listeners internalize a little bit more sometimes when we're comparing these things it it's confounded by the elevation gain elevation loss you can compare a 50k road race to 50k mountainous race and come up with kind of completely different conclusions in this way you've got them kind of isolated almost simply across uh distance and duration because the environment although it's not exactly the same every single day or every single race it's kind of close enough to where you know you can get a true assertion of what's going on as the distance goes up and down yeah exactly i think that that was very good it's actually something that it has been in two other studies uh one like the first author of one of them is a alexandra quotes i think his name yeah alexandra quotes and that's from also from the group of jamie burr yep and and i think that they actually used a loop course so it would be even better for this and another one by gutter is the first author but they only used two distances and i think it's like that like a very cool design and i also think that we were very lucky because it was one week but it's one week in the mountains so we were very lucky to have the same weather basically for every race like

didn't rain any of the days the temperature at the finish line which is when we can have a reliable measure of temperature was always the same it was not like one day they had a storm on top of the mountains whereas in another race they didn't but yeah this is true the the race profiles are very similar but more or less extended i would say for them okay so we have this classic endurance model right the velocity that you can run is equal to the fraction of vo2 max you can sustain divided by the cost of running and for inner any enterprising listener out there that wants to do the algebra on that you're more you're more than welcome to and see how all the variables and all the units actually cancel out and you end up getting velocity at the end of the day um and and you wanted to see how much more dynamic that became or if it became more dynamic at the at these ultra marathon distances so kind of take us through the the the results of which and you can do it in whatever order you kind of like want to however it's logical in your brain but what did you find out actually makes a difference in terms of the performance outcomes at the end of the day yeah so first of all uh one thing that was previously said in the literature and with studies in which they take the same subjects and make them run at different days different races is that deal to max for example seems to be more important in short races short price in this case being like a 50 like a five kilometer race than in longer races so like an 80 kilometer race i think it was so i think it was that like you have 5k and a 50 miler

and there were in the middle maybe i don't remember the exciting but maybe there was like a 5k a marathon and that and so it's like there is this idea in the literature that vo2 max matters less when the distance gets longer and this may be because you are actually running farther from vo2 max you're running at the lower vo2 so maybe the other factors are more important and it's one thing that has been said many times that in the marathon for example vo2 max might be less important whereas the running economy may be more important so we wanted to like i wouldn't say get the definite answer to that because we don't have that yet but like started getting closer to to that like teasing out this question yep so what we found was mainly that there were some things that correlated with performance more more than others obviously and i think that the most interesting thing that we found was that vo2 max was still correlated with performance in the short distances so to remind the listeners that's 40 and 55 kilometers and what what is what are those just to just to make sure that the audience understands it as well what's what are the times that those people are finishing in that you're for your subject group ballpark actually i will look at that very quickly because i don't remember the exact numbers and but i think we have them easy to access here yeah that's totally fine yeah so they were so i actually i have here the winning times so the winners

were finishing between 3 40 and 5 19 okay like the short like the two different races four to five hour race yeah exactly exactly basically four to five hours for the winner yep and then the medium race the 100 kilometer race was 10 hours 30 basically so double and they're long ones over double yeah and they long the 145 and 170 18 hours and 20 hours for the winners that so this is like this is kind of how i was lining it up on my head it's kind of a double right in terms of in terms of time every like group you go up yeah and then so for our actual participants i don't have the exact numbers but i have them in the graph and i think it was about 30 something hours 34 35 hours on average for the long races i think it was about 21 hours for the 100 kilometer races and it was maybe like four to seven or eight hours for the short races okay and another interesting thing was that where there was very little overlap between groups yeah i think that there was one person overlapping the fastest runner of the longest race run a time that was faster than the slowest person of the of the 100 kilometer race so you've got a very little yeah you've got a clear separation of the like the duration bucket so to speak yeah yeah okay perfect okay so continue on you're you're discussing the short the results of vo2 max in terms of the short uh short races yeah exactly so we found a pretty good relationship between vo2 max and

performance in the short races and also in the medium races so we find that up to 100 kilometers it seems to be that vo2 max works pretty well as i mean works pretty well as a i correlate i don't want to say predictor because it's not exactly but basically if you are more aerobically fit you do better but we found that at least in our sample this relationship broke in in the longer races this relationship was no longer true for the longer traces longer races and part of that might have been due to like the way that we might have been a bit unlucky on how these runners run the race or how they perform because one thing that happens for example is that there's a clustering of performances very close to the to the end of the of the to the limit to the time limit the time limit in the UTMB i don't remember right now exactly it's 45 hours maybe let's say it's 45 hours so there's a lot of people between 42 and 45 hours which might be people that were aiming for a faster performance right right but then in the end like they didn't get that and said like okay i can drop out because this is the other problem we we have dropouts right so but let me let me rephrase that motivation is confounding your results yeah absolutely and motivation is that and like the things that it can confound it like in a positive way like better motivated people run better but also people who are very motivated can run worse because

they are not so motivated to drop out when their pace drops right i mean this goes back to the very first thing it's like well vo2 max decouples or becomes uncorrelated or whatever either because it's less important and or because other things become more important in one of those other things just being the sheer motivation that you have to like suffer yeah absolutely i think that this is totally true that vo2 max is like might be an important factor but the reason why it starts being more important it could be that you are running at an intensity of this lower than vo2 max and therefore you don't really need that but it may be like maybe we can get into this later but like there's a million things that can happen in a 40-hour race or like a 30-hour race that will change your view like the magnitude of the importance of the vo2 max whereas in a five kilometer race you have 15 to 20 minutes 15 to 25 minutes i don't know yeah like various there's not much that can go wrong yeah very astute observation there's not much that can go wrong i think that kind of like sums up the difference between uh uh regular distances and ultra marathon distances right there there's more stuff that can go wrong okay so let's keep going through it right so you've got vo2 max it kind of decouples what else yeah exactly vo2 max was the first one and then the next one that we looked at was cost of running running economy and this one was interesting because like you can not really say in science that something was almost significant it was something is either significant or it's not significant right so like statistically it's not

correct but like it's in this case for the short races it was not far from being significant sometimes what happens is that if you happen to have more subjects but the same type of relationship things become significant just because like the how the numbers are cramped by the equations that determine statistical significance or not but even then there was absolutely no relationship between performance and running economy in any of the two longer distance categories and this is one that has me like little puzzles i have also done work through my PhD on like running economy itself so like for example how in this same study like in the UTMB how does running economy change from when measured the day before the UTMB and just after you come back so we did that just after they arrived to the finish line they came to the lab to do some testing and then after an hour or so i made them run for i think it was two times four minutes that's so brutal by the way it doesn't sound like much on paper but after you've done UTMB like doing two by four minutes and it's sub maximal effort is the last thing you want to do yeah absolutely and we have people like we have people like falling asleep on their chairs yeah i'm sure they didn't want to do that wait okay before we go on let's let the listeners appreciate this so when you're traditionally studying running economy very briefly describe what that setup looks like in terms of like what the participants are actually going through okay it that's it's relatively simple so they arrive into the lab and

then they wear a mask like they would work for a build max test that measures oxygen and co2 and with oxygen and co2 and knowing the speed of the treadmill we can calculate the running economy how much energy they are burning to that so what but they're running at a sub max this is this is exactly so yeah that's where i'm uh where i what i want to explain now so in this case because we wanted to do both like flat and uphill running you would put both of them at a sub-maximal speed that should be relatively easy like very often in the lab with uh with recreational athletes but recreational athletes that finish the UTMB we have measured this at 10 kilometers per hour yeah so about 10 minute miles 10 minutes per month yep and like for elite marathon runners that can run a marathon at faster than 20 kilometers 20 kilometers per hour the traditional speed to measure it is 16 kilometers per hour so it's like very some maximal uh and it actually has to be some maximal because the you cannot use the numbers if your are we are like the relation if you are if your intensity is too high you cannot use the numbers yeah that's a good way to calculate running economy yeah that's a good way to explain okay so i just want the listeners to appreciate what people have to go through after running UTMB to participate in your research yeah and actually i think that this was the easy part the difficult part was like the funny part was that they have to go and like do maximal contraction and screened on a bicycle and

it's like it's very hard for sure and that like there were people falling asleep there were sometimes we had people on the treadmill and we had four people around them like i'm gonna catch him i'm gonna catch him because we were afraid that they would fall off we didn't have any accidents luckily okay so what happens to running economy after you finish a race like UTMB so this this is like this is funny and somewhat paradoxical because what happens is that uh after the shorts races uh running economy gets worse so basically you use more energy to do the same task that you were doing before to run the same distance at the same speed however after the long races there was no change which is insane so it's crazy to think about yeah exactly it's crazy to think about it and i think that there are two main possible explanations one is that the like a race that is so long forces you to change your running pattern to be more economical more than a race any social than is shorter and the other part is that maybe what happens that it's actually intensity and not duration the main driver of the change in running economy because there's previous research done that shows a no change or even an improvement in running economy after tour de jane i know right that that i know i know the study that you're referencing i'm going to link it up in the show notes that one blew my mind when i saw that one because i'm like there's no way because i did tour de jane it's so like like visceral for me but is that like it's a problem when you're mentioning running economy so the thing and one thing that i

find puzzling about this is the main fact and the main idea that we're always measuring that running economy on a treadmill so this is part of the work that we are doing now that to what extent is running economy on a treadmill really representative of what happens like we for example we measure people running uphill at a 15 incline on a treadmill when you don't have to do anything you don't have to think but anyone that has done a like a children in race doesn't even have to be like a 100 mile ultra marathon or like a long trail running uh like training session in the mountains or even hiking like if you have gone backpacking and like after three days you're tired like you feel that you're dumber like your feet don't go where you want to go like this is my feeling like my my legs are becoming dumb right like you trip more often maybe you're not lifting your feet so much like you don't like you say like i want to put my foot there but it doesn't get exactly there so there's a little bit more wobbliness maybe you make worse decisions and you don't pick the best line that you should be choosing on the trail and none of that can be measured on the treadmill yeah so the thing is like it would be very difficult to standardize like make people run up a trail after after an ultra marathon race right so it's not something that can be easily measured but it's one some work that we're doing now is about what is really the relationship between running economy measured on a treadmill compared to measured on a trail yeah and i think that this is from a performance

standpoint i might be wrong on this this is just my hunch that from a performance standpoint figuring out who can carry that traditional running economy over into a trail setting and who cannot we'll start to tease out some of that some of that performance because certainly there's there's that component there that component of skill or in your words who becomes less dumb or whose legs become less dumb as the uh uh as as the duration of the of the race increases i want to pause for a second and just kind of like recap this because i think this is really important from a training perspective so you look at you you measure what i'll call traditional running economy flat level ground submaximal speed you find no changes in the long distance but more importantly you find um no changes from before and after in the long distances and some changes in short distances but more importantly it's not correlated with performance at any of the distances and you've mentioned we've started to see this like crop up before and what what i've started to take away from a coaching perspective that i want to get your input on since you know this uh area a whole lot better than than i do is that first off the way that we treat running economy in a road running perspective or a 10k and marathon perspective is like this king and queen maker almost i mean so much emphasis has been put on it especially in the past like five or eight years of the like the

the the apex of this three variable equation that we mentioned earlier to to kind of separate elite performances that's certainly not as true in a in a in a trail running perspective but the pragmatic takeaway at least from my coaching eye is that the training interventions that we've traditionally used for specifically to improve road running economy and i'm using those words very deliberately deliberately specifically to improve road running economy or traditionally measured economy those training interventions might not necessarily be as valid or as have as much utility in a trail running perspective because of that decoupling and i'm just wondering like what your general thoughts on that could be and and and that can get as practical as like we use like plyometric training and all these other things to kind of like jerry rig running economy and a road running perspective and it always has me think whenever i see results like this it always has me thinking should we actually be doing that for people on the trail if that variable isn't as important so i want to i want to get your perspective on that whole line of thinking yeah so like one caveat that i want to say before i say any of this is that it's something that happens in coaching all the time and i have been guilty of that while coaching people sometimes that sometimes we are using an intervention thinking that we use it to improve

something it's actually working on something completely different and that's why it's good it may not be improving running economy and it may be improving something else yes like because like we talk about plyometric training for example like plyometric training may not help you at all it's possible it doesn't help you at all to improve your running economy while either running or hiking up on on trails but i wonder if like doing some plyometric training which you already do when you are running downhill actually but like but maybe like for some people who don't have access to be up and downhill doing some plyometric training might help them like adapt their tendons or their joints to to those impacts however looking at their running economy i think that i must agree with that like i have been like especially hiking with with people with friends sometimes that like that are faster athletes than me i uh like that are like a fast person like a soccer player or something like that and then when the terrain like having to cross a river because i am more used to the mountain environment like i do like stone stone stone stone stone stone and then i get to the other side like very fast and very easily and i think that how much how big is the impact of this person of this compared to this other person that might be a better sprinter might have better biometric training you know and it's just hiking not even considering the running part right but yeah so i think that doing that doing strides doing like any kind of sprinting

do i think that it might be useful maybe yes but for to specifically to improve running economy on trails and like the more technical the trails are like the more uphill and downhill there is and the rockier they are i think that there might be less carryover to to improving running economy i won't say to improve performance but like to improve running economy there there there there will be less because it will probably improve your running economy when you measure it on a treadmill 100 i don't know if you will pray improve your running economy when you're running up that massive hill that is on like the led build 100 i don't remember the name of that yeah we're like yeah so when like will it improve when you're basically like putting your hands on your knees like what does that have to do with like striding fast so yeah yeah it's a this is ultimately from a practical standpoint here's how i've kind of like implemented that information is that i don't chase it around right i would go and i would chase around running economy if i had a two-hour marathoner for sure 100 i would chase that variable around a lot like i would do a lot of training interventions trying to optimize that for a trail runner not so much i'd take the trail i'd take the running economy benefit that you just get from training right you get running economy benefits just from doing different you know different speeds different you know different types of workouts different length of intervals and things like that just normal day-to-day training will improve you know improve

running economy to a certain extent for most people maybe not the most elite of elite but i guess my point is is is because the correlation has been kind of is starting to be more consistently shown to not be very strong it's just not a thing that i'm willing to like chase around i'd rather chase around other stuff that matters more right that that um that that you that you have pointed out so anyway that's more of a practical thing here here there you actually reminded me of something that i think is pretty interesting like i the one thing that i have always measured has been running economy and i think this is like a part of it is bias in the literature because what is measured is running economy one thing that i have been like that i would like to do one day is to test walking economy walking just walking up a treadmill at 20 and just and measuring this walking economy so because we might have in ultra marathon people who are doing all of these like training interventions when maybe what you should be doing is like practice power hiking yeah uh appeals to like like get smooth get this smooth hiking to actually measure your your walking economy by doing it instead of by this like cross training if you want intervention i'll uh so i'll point the listeners to i don't know if you listen to this podcast or not but a podcast that i did with jackson brill whose master's thesis up at the university of colorado and roger crom's old lab um uh did did a lot did a lot of this work so uh rather than rather than rehashing all that that entire podcast i'll i'll direct the listeners there because it is quite interesting and we do see i would say inter we do see individual differences in

terms of how their flat level economy compares to their uphill running or walking uh economy although that research is very very very very early stage and you know to a lot extent non-existent okay so we've got the one variable vo2 max second variable running economy what's next so then like we actually tried like putting up a bunch of variables in there and like the ones that you basically like don't even see in the paper is that so like i think that the sentence that i use in the paper is something similar to like vo2 max and the velocity at vo2 max which would be like the speed at the end of the test before the person stops and then the and then i think i use like something like other aerobic fitness variables such as like the speed at or your the vo2 at your thresholds like the first and second threshold they are also correlate with performance but like the magnitude of the correlation is smaller than vo2 max it's also true that they have more there's more error in the measurement of those things so it may be part of the reason why but then other things such as for example like the the percentage of at which the threshold the percentage of vo2 max at which thresholds occur like it's had no relationship at all uh so like the fastest personal was not the one that will have the threshold at 90 percent compared to the one at 80 percent of vo2 max once again very very unlike marathon running right yeah

but like what happens there is that it's always the multiplication of what your vo2 max is times what fraction of that you can sustain right so what we've found at least in our sample the magnitude of vo2 max seems to overpower that right because and i think that it might be that you're not going to be able to uh in our sample of non-elite runners uh we find more variability that you can have someone that is on the high side of vo2 max and being on the low side of um of like percentage of threshold whereas if you take a group of like elite marathon runners and compare them to a group of non-elite marathon runners maybe both of the elite will have both higher view too much and higher percentage of deal too much your circle maybe in elite populations exactly they go more together but then like other things that we looked at were body composition in which we found the same so like body fat percentage basically having less body fat this is i think a message that you will put all the disclaimers on that and like body composition it's not about chasing uh low body fat percentage but it seemed to be uh to show a good correlation with performance at the same time what happened was that there was a very good correlation between body fat percentage and vo2 max right so the correlation between body fat percentage and vo2 max was even like in the same ballpark as a correlation between body fat percentage and performance right and this is because when we measure vo2 max in running at least we divide it by body weight

because we have to carry it so it seems that the benefit would come from there so it's not about chasing a low weight it's like same thing that the cyclists say like maybe the power to weight ratio right right so then the other variable that we looked at was lipid metabolism and a caveat for this as well is that we did not do a proper fat max test which like maybe your listeners i don't know if you have had someone on the podcast talking about this but like doing a pro proper fat max test is about taking like taking a person to like different long stages yeah like let's say you run at like six seven eight nine ten miles per hour for four or five minutes maybe and then you measure how much of the energy that they are using is coming from from fat and how much is coming from from carbohydrates the the salient point there is a fat max test will typically be longer and have longer stages associated with it because you're trying to specifically see what the maximum amount of fat that you're that you're burning per minute and this is i'm going to go off on a tangent here so you're going to put up with this this is the issue that i've always had with the fat metabolism magicians out there that try to claim that somehow they're optimizing their fat metabolism through this that or the other a lot of the times what they're

doing is they're comparing their results to results from tests that weren't intended to optimize or maximum or measure maximum fat oxidation and it's like comparing apples and oranges because you can always manipulate the test to get a different type of substrate mix depending upon the length of the individual stages where you start the stages at is the athlete fasted or fed beforehand there's like all these other variables and i've always seen this stuff like put out by particularly a lot of the people that promote maximum fat oxidation or optimize fat oxidation as some sort of magical intervention but what they're doing that their results are superior or whatever and in many cases not at all but in many cases they're comparing apples and oranges simply because the tests are different so anyway that's my that's my that's my spiel on that so i'm glad that you mentioned that caveat that you didn't do it in a quote-unquote i don't know traditional or whatever whatever way for the for the fat oxidation side of things so in a fat oxidation not maximal fat oxidation test like that you have to be much more strict because you want everyone coming in in the same metabolic condition so like the same amount of hours fasted and like we had to we were not able to do that yeah that's hard yeah we had like i don't know like 75 people to test in like basically a month before the race and they had to come into the

lab and do the testing of familiarize with the neuromuscular stuff there was a lot of stuff that they had to do so it was just like yeah we were not able to do this and we chose the test that we could but one thing that we did was during the running economy test like five minutes running at 10 kilometers per hour then like at the end of that we said like okay when you run at this speed what is your fat max yeah okay so like there you go how much of that of that is coming so it's not a fat max test like i it is we cannot compare it to a fat max test what you were saying before yeah right so but like it gives us an idea like this was the idea like can we get a glimpse from the data that we have and we get a glimpse about like how these different people uh use for metabolized fat and in this case we found that interestingly only in the short race races uh people that had greater fat metabolism had better performance so like there was a negative correlation so with more fat metabolism lead to better performance and interestingly that which was also like a bit puzzling for us like why is this that it's in the short races when in theory the longer the races let's bear in mind these short races were like six hour races for for most of the people right but which is definitely into the fat metabolism side of the of the exercise spectrum but it was more important in those races than on in the like let's say 10 hour races or 20 hour races for the winners which were actually like

20 hour races or 36 hour races for the for our participants but you guys found that as surprising right i mean yeah see i look at that as not all that surprising and he and and i think there's some dialogue in your uh discussion section that i think alludes to this as well is that the longer distances you're so far underneath your maximum energy production threshold right or the maximum amount of energy that you can produce that that little bit of extra fat metabolism is kind of irrelevant to the actual performance right it doesn't actually boost it because you're it's kind of like the vo2 max proposition right you're running at such a such a smaller percentage of your max of your true vo2 max that bumping your vo2 max up might not have that big of a difference i kind of view it as the same thing here especially at the longer distances yeah i think that this is probably the case like basically the thing is that i think part of it may be because of like traditional exercise science has not gone much beyond the two hours of the marathon we say like okay after this the problem you have is glycogen like depletion yeah right you're going to run out of glycogen and then you'll have to slow down what might be happening and this is like the research of d has been showing like in longer races central fatigue yeah it's more important so fatigue that is happening basically directly in the nervous system and it may not be a glycogen depletion so what happens is that maybe you're not depleting

a glycogen that much and also the lower intensity allows you to eat more compared to the shorter races exactly so i think that both of both of those things may contribute to it being less important for these sort of distances yeah and here once again we'll kind of like drive it home from a practical perspective since i'm like the practitioner in the room here and you can you could give me your thoughts on this one is at the longer distances i'm not as willing to go and try to manipulate things to get enhanced fat metabolism because once again it's not all that relevant because you're so far below your ceiling maybe that's relevant at like i don't know like a five or six hour duration maybe there's some sort of like sweet spot there but certainly at the longer distances a training takes care of most of how much maximum how much fat you can metabolize per minute whatever maximum rate that you can kind of get to and anything else beyond that is you know very it is is kind of trivial so that's what i've kind of like when i see things like that that's what i kind of take away from these things it's once again what what things do i chase and what things do i don't chase right that's kind of the theme of research like this and the metabolism thing especially at the longer distances is something that i'm just not chasing anymore i'd rather chase fitness gains yeah and i think this might well be very true that and also that that with the long duration training that everyone who is training for this is doing or maybe we could say should be doing but like it will take care of most of that and then

maybe the most important thing is that like don't screw up don't do stuff that is like obviously like don't have a diet of coca-cola every day sort of thing right that maybe will uptick your metabolism in like the wrong side but as long as you're having like a normal uh like training and duration schedule for this like you can probably be that like you will be using a lot of fat during your low intensity training yeah for sure okay so what else remarkable from this or as an extension of this and we'll get into what the future might look like in a second did you like take from doing all this research hmm i would say that i mean to me it was part of it was just like confirmation i i really liked seeing that up to 20 kilometers i mean 20 hours for the for like 10 hours for the winner and 20 hours for many of our athletes in this 100 kilometer race like vo2 max still matters and like and i by view too much still matters i think that vo2 max is the thing that we're measuring here i have a bit of a i don't know like like i'm not a super big fan of vo2 max as a unit sometimes because like vo2 max is using like it takes into account like the size of your heart and like the oxygen transport you know so it's like it integrates everything but at the same time like are we just saying that this vo2 max when it might be one of the sub components of vo2 max maybe it's not maybe it's just the integration of all of them but because like is this uh it's one thing that i have thought a lot about like how should we for example after these results like should we train vo2 max in the same way for a 5k runner compared to a

to an ultra marathon runner that's an interesting because if you're using because there is there are these like sprint interval training studies that do like five times or like six times 30 second sprints and show one improvement in vo2 max like what maybe you do that with an ultra marathon runner and you improve vo2 max but do we know what the mechanism is that is improving this vo2 max and is this the mechanism that will also improve the vo2 max or like improve vo2 max in a useful way for the ultra marathon runner and we just don't know that so i think that like i guess that you have to train vo2 max but i don't know if we can just train vo2 max by doing like all our three minute intervals or whatever it is like if this is just the exact way in which we should be doing this oh so i'm gonna put you on the spot you got to put up with it what's your hunch because you're right you can train different components of vo2 max and they've you know the you've you're familiar with the fundamental physiology as well as the research behind this there are certain steps of the process that limit vo2 max that we've kind of readily identified especially with especially with endurance athletes but what's your hunch like what's your hunch in terms of what's more important what component is more important in an ultra marathon setting uh you are definitely putting me on the spot because i do not have an answer to that and like it's something that i have brought up in like class teaching the master

students sometimes i'm like well and what is it and like i have not been able to come up with an answer because like i still wonder what is limiting i i don't think that the important thing is vo2 max i think what matters is aerobic fitness yeah some piece of it it just happens that we measure aerobic fitness which is like a nebulous concept here as vo2 max but i and the people that have very good aerobic fitness have very high deal to match and therefore they show up as high view to max for high performance and that's why we find this relationship but like taking to account that everything is so sub-maximal it must be a combination of like all the things but i don't think the business are like having a bigger heart because like well you have a bigger heart so your maximum cardiac output is whatever but like yeah but you're operating at a lower cardiac output than than that during an ultra marathon race so like do you really need that maximum how part of i think jamie burr has done some work on like how your cardiac output decreases in a after on your cardiac function decreases so maybe if you have a bigger heart you have you can lose more heart uh pumping ability let's say but still having have a higher one for so for the listeners out there before we get like too far in the weeds and lose people let me try i'm going to try to colloquialize this a little bit so when we talk about what limits vo2 max there's kind of like three stages of it the first stage is the what i'll call the capacity stage which is how big your heart is how much how much blood volume can it fill up with

before it disperses it throughout your body second stage is the transport stage so taking that oxygen from uh from the environment and into your working muscles and the last stage is how your oxygen or how your muscles can essentially utilize that that oxygen and for years physiologists have tried to like peel apart what's the most important thing in it and here's where it actually shows up the most this is why cyclists use epo doping is because very specifically it enhances the transport piece of that they have more red blood cells to transport the oxygen from the lungs into the muscles they're not using like mitochondrial doping right which would be the you which would be the final end stage utilization piece of it and so they knowing this like pat this very crude pathway that i just just that i just tried to describe there's some exercise physiologist uh teacher professor out there that is now cringing at this at this uh description of and maybe you are yourself because it's been a long time since i've described it to somebody but anyway the my point of my point with this is is these stages of how vo2 max actually materialize it's been debated for a long time what limits what in what type of in kind of what type of environment and the traditional way that we've looked at this from from a more endurance sport you know marathon 10k and things like that is that the delivery piece of it is the

limiting factor and we see that unfold in real time as how people manipulate the system in order to in order to improve performance what you're saying is is that might not be true where there might be something else that is playing a bigger part as the duration goes up maybe it's the heart size maybe it's something at the mitochondrial side of things maybe it's something different i need something and it's totally like and i don't know what it is because like for example one thing that happens i also think that one reason why cyclists or endurance athletes just blood doping you can you can throw cyclists the sun or the bus they're they're the big culprits yeah it's relatively easy to do like it's very hard to increase the size of the heart and like there are some studies in which if i'm not wrong they cut the heart of a poor dog and then like they they cut the membrane around the heart and then the heart can expand more and then it increases the vo2 max of the dog but you cannot do that to an athlete but like putting more blood into the veins it's readily doubled so so i think that that might also be part of the the reason however like for all of these things like it's the same for all of them like like mitochondrial capacity and like the utilization seems not to limit vo2 max yeah because mitochondria are overbuilt yeah and then so then we have the other two but then it's like at an in during an ultra marathon it's not your heart rate max that is limiting you because like you can always put more heart rate right so it's not your it's not cool like is it your oxygen transport it's like well if you can

run a 5k you can transport more oxygen than the oxygen that you're transporting right now so why don't you just bring it up yeah right so this is why i think it's like a very very interesting question uh on like what is going to be limiting this and that i think that part of the answer might be how those things deteriorate over time like in the same vein that we're saying before that running economy gets worse so how do these things get worse because maybe it's not as much who has like the higher like the best oxygen transport at the beginning but who deteriorates the least yeah it's almost like a hundred meter dash right it's not who gets to the peak velocity it's who deteriorates the least so yeah super interesting i know that's a little bit of a more more of a nuanced debate so let's take it to the future like we talked we've already talked a little bit about that we want to explore some of these areas of what what things deteriorate least and how they impact performance what like personally since you're obviously super curious in this area what what do you want to see or what do you want to actually do next well i think that like what i said before about like some things that are very specific to especially not as much ultra running but trail running so like things that are very related to the environment and and many of these things i am not actually qualified to do because there should be people who work on like skill acquisition and it's a funny thing because it seems like there are scientists that study skill acquisition there i'm not in that field but are there scientists that study skill loss skill deterioration right because it will be like the inverse but what happens

after an acute intervention right so that part like how does the technique and also like the tactical decision making basically it's like it's like all of these unknowns like the reason why the physiology is less predictive in longer distances is mainly that if according to me is that there are more things that can go wrong so like yeah like you have much more time to get a blister right and like a blister can be i decrease my pace by 50 yeah so that's it like you have less time to get a blister or and even if you have a blister if you get a blister in like a five kilometer race you may put up with it until the end yeah right so elliot kipchoge who's like insoles came out of what marathon was it exactly the marathon several years ago that was hilarious it was the olympic games in 2016 that's right yeah right but yeah exactly so like if it's a relatively short time maybe you can put up with that but like same thing like if your insults move during a 170 kilometer race you're gonna stop and fix them yeah exactly like first of all you're going to stop on 16 that's one thing like how much people stop it's something that yeah zero yeah it's i like is it a limitation towards study but there are people that take naps yeah so like what is the optimal napping like how much time do you lose for how much time you gain after so all of this is not really physiology but i find it super interesting and and super cool and a lot of this is this like to what extent does the things that we measure in the

lab to what extent do they relate to the things that we measure that well that are actually happening on the field so one thing that i can measure vo2 much in the lab here in saint etienne at about 500 meters above sea level that would be about 1400 feet above sea level but then we send them to run in salmon each and like in the UTMB i think they go up to 2800 meters so almost 10 000 feet so when like how much vo2 much do you lose when you go to altitude yeah right and this is like another thing that will have an impact so like there's a much bigger accumulation of impact when we're when we're just talking about the physiology so all of these are things that will like i guess take a lot of time to be this style because usually for example in this case the altitude research has been done like we're going to have the olympic games in mexico so we should learn about altitude but everything happens at the same elevation yeah but what happens when you're going from almost sea level to i don't know 3000 meters of elevation here's a good case study for you to peel apart on that is the one with so i live in colorado springs colorado it's the one with matt carpenter who has the highest vo2 max recorded at the training center right around the corner from me and um i just happen to know a lot about his physiology because the person who did those tests was one of my mentors for a long a long a long long period of time and um they when they tested his vo2 max at 92 which then got verified at another uh at another testing site over in italy uh they kind of found the same

things where his vo2 max was so high but his running economy was terrible which really which really explained why he was so good at sky running races and kind of not very good at marathon races i think his pr was like 219 or 216 or something like that but yet he could you know absolutely destroy people on the mountains and especially up and down pike's peak and has the leadville record which is kind of one of the most outstanding uh trail running records that that's still around and the physiologist over there would always kind of debate that that run that way that we traditionally measure running economy as we were talking about earlier is just not that important once the surface changes and for whatever reason his skill acquisition to use your you know your phrase that you just went through on the trails was just so superior as compared to you know his his competitors that that traditional running economy was just not very kind of very meaningful so there there's some i mean there's some precedent behind a lot of these things that you're actually mentioning although it hasn't been quite fully teased out in the uh in the uh in the literature one thing that you just made me think of like you can get to the top of pike's peak by car right yeah oh yeah they've done a lot of research on the top of there yeah like was he ever tested like did he ever get his view to max tested on the top because like i mean it was seven like how people in there are done it i think that there are there's research being done there but i would

be interested in the case study yeah i'll ping so from another former guest rob mazio who's done a lot of research on the top of pike's peak there's actually a military kind of installation there where they do a lot of research i'll i'll ping him i don't i don't think he was one of the subjects there but once again the theory was is his vo2 max didn't deteriorate as much going up to altitude as other people that was like the working kind of deal there because you got to understand these people this was you know in the 90s and you know early early well all the 90s i guess so we didn't have as much to go off of but their theories were is kind of this two-part thing where he has a super high vo2 max but a really terrible running economy the running economy didn't really translate into the trails as much and then for whatever reason his his because his performance did not deteriorate at vo2 max for whatever reason he has some physiological physiological trait where it doesn't deteriorate as much as some of his competitors when he gets up to 10 14 000 feet and things like that it actually kind of plays out in the races like when you look at the splits over the years where his separation would be is kind of above 10 000 feet above tree line so anyway interesting stuff to kind of to kind of bat around if i can dig up that information man i'll send it over to you and you can go hog wild with it please do so yeah i like i think then that the so going back to our previous discussion the other thing that i would like to see much more of is like the other specific factor of ultra marathon or

like the other specific like i don't know thing of ultra marathon which is like the duration so it's all of this stuff about like the deterioration of all the variables that we have talked about which is something that more research has been coming out on this like there's like there's this idea of durability that has been like there have been publications about it recently so it's this like how much does durability influence this how does this how can we improve this durability and maybe the answer to that will just be like you do long runs and it's like well what we were doing all the time but i don't know will we learn anything new about it or will we or maybe we'll just point people in the direction of saying like oh this type of training is actually more important maybe it's worth it for you to like do a seven hour run or whatever it is or like an all-day hike run session is more important than what we thought before yeah it's a it's it is kind of a mystery and once again i'll fully admit that from a training intervention standpoint we still guess more than we know right you never really know but like there is a still very much an educated guessing process and much more so than you see in the track and field distances wherever all the training is fairly you know relatively standard i guess compared to what we see up here the marathon distance and things like that and even in iron man triathlon where it's really not all that different from you know person to person or from or

from group to group or whatever they'll like to argue about the nuance but kind of fundamentally once you back the lens out it's it's it's very very similar i keep coming whenever i have conversations with people like yourself that tease us apart i keep coming down to this like two-pronged thesis of how to of how to internalize ultramarathon training it's get as fit as possible in your vo2 max data kind of cooperates that right just get us do whatever do whatever training interventions you think get you as fit as possible you like a lot of volume do a lot of volume you want to do some intervals let's do some intervals and let's make them like logical and then find your limiting factors and work on those if your limiting factors is you're going to fall asleep let's figure out an intervention to like like make you not fall asleep if your limiting factor is your quads are going to get shot right to use like a colloquial term uh for fatigue right then let's work on that if your limiting factors is you're going to puke for 10 hours let's go and work on that because these other things that we can measure the correlations are just so spurious that it doesn't make sense to chase one down or the other it makes sense to chase down the thing that is going to affect you the most that's kind of the way that i've like looked at like training when i'm when i'm critically evaluating all the things that i can do is i can't come up with a really compelling reason to do anything than just improve fitness and figure out what the biggest limiting factors are and try to cover those up as much as possible yeah i think that makes a lot of sense like the way in which i have been thinking about my vo2 max

result especially in the long in the very long races so like whenever you see the graphs which we're not able to see right now but whenever you see the graphs you always see like a sort of line between like performance and vo2 max in trail running races that is like it looks like you unless you have this vo2 max like you have to be on this side of the line because if you are you it's impossible for someone with like a vo2 max of 40 to run a 24 hour utmv yeah right i you need a vo2 max of 60 so get as fit as possible but then like make sure that you don't have any of the problems that makes someone with a vo2 max of let's say 60 that would maybe finish in like 32 hours to finish in 39 hours because they had this problem so i think that it makes a lot of sense what the club the club right is like we always mention like who's in the who's in the quote-unquote club for the elite side of things it's just a bigger sphere in ultramarathon when we're looking when we're looking at their physiology and the reason that it's a bigger sphere a bigger sphere is that there are more variables at play once again going originally back to what we're talking about what geese theorized you know 10 or 14 years ago and what the research is now starting to cooperate is that all these factors just start to play a bigger a bigger role because oxygen is not the limiting factor or is not as big of a limiting factor it's at all the caveats in there yeah all right but we're gonna let you go i'm gonna give you the last word first off how can people find more about found i find out more about you and the research that you

do and perhaps even get involved i'm gonna tap into our audience here for subjects and anything that you're doing well so if they want to get involved actually we have recently started a study that is like online sort of like crowdsource study like it's linked to an app so like i'm sure that you could like link it on the show notes or something i will i know what you're talking about because i sent that out via my socials a couple weeks ago yeah so and then there is so that study which aims to tease out like yeah how do people actually train yeah i love that by the way can we find like good and for that one is like the more people the better so like that would be great to get involved and then like you can find me on research gate like my name and two last names you can find me on twitter and let me check my twitter handle actually it's like i love how all the physiologists they're on twitter but they don't know what their handles are it's so hilarious like i mean i use it i get on it every day but i guess we don't talk to ourselves that much i don't know yeah it's actually it's simple it's frederick's past so frederick my name s this first initial of my first last name and past p-a-s-t the first first letter of my other of my last last name and hopefully by the time this up like there will be a fredericksabater.com website perfect as well which i will put some of my like research on stuff like that perfect i'll have links to that in the show notes anybody can go check it out do check it out because it is a wealth

of information i appreciate what you and what your team there does it helps me out professionally as a coach but more importantly you're starting to solve some of the riddles that um that exist in the ultra marathon world and we should all be great grateful for that because better performances more prepared athletes just means safer races and more exciting races and it's it's finally cool to see a lot of this research very in its very early stages start to emerge and i hope 20 years from now um we can kind of like come back on conversations like this and say yeah you know like now we've we've got it evolved and now we've figured out this this and this matters more that's the way the evolution of everything goes so anyway i'm very appreciative for you and your work thank you all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to frederick for coming on the podcast today i hope to bring him back because it sounds like they're doing some exciting stuff coming out of his lab having to do not only with ultra marathon but with a lot of fatigue which is an incredibly fascinating area in sports performance appreciate the heck out of what he is doing as well as his colleagues are doing because as i mentioned from the onset this is a question that i think really gets to the roots of how we can effectively train ultra marathon runners for performance but there is a lot of work to go because i have always maintained and a lot of coaches will be with me on this performance is always a multi-factorial endeavor you can never rely on one single thing to hinge your

performance on and inevitably it's going to be this big soup of a lot of different variables when we look at when we look at this from an ultra marathon perspective appreciate the heck out of all you listeners out there if you like this podcast feel free to share it with your friends and your training partners it always means a lot to me when i meet you guys out in the field the summer racing season is upon us now and if you've gained valuable insight from this podcast please share it with your friends and as well as your training partners so that they can get that same information as well that's it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails video