The Neuroscience of Ultrarunning with Scott Frey, PhD | KoopCast Episode #182

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 this episode of the podcast is about that little three pound organ that sits in between our ears that we are beginning to appreciate more and more about how it affects performance and maybe just as much if not more so than the physiology itself on the podcast today is dr scott fry dr fry is an internationally renowned neuroscientist and psychologist he's an accomplished endurance athlete in his own right he's an author a teacher and a true expert and pioneer in the field of neuroscience during the podcast today we discuss our relationship with pain how perception of effort is formed and how the duration of ultra marathon events sometimes fools our perception of effort and strategies ultra runners can use to train for and cope with race day effort related pain this is a podcast where the content and knowledge itself almost without further intervention can have a direct and immediate impact on your race day performance i hope you appreciate this conversation with dr fry as much as i did and as with every

podcast i am getting immediately out of the way with no ads no sponsors just good old-fashioned knowledge bombs to deliver to you guys all right here it is this is my conversation with dr scott fry i have to say right off the bat i've been kind of anxious about recording this ever since we set it up on the calendar and part of it is it's the i'm i'm classically trained from the physiological side as you've probably run into with a lot of coaches that are my age you know i'm 44 now and that was the bias you know 15 years ago certainly it might even be the bias now but but i also feel that when we talk about like the brain it's just this mysterious organ in between our ears and then we when we talk about neurophysiology or when we talk about like neuroscience it's like this blend of biology and chemistry and physiology and philosophy and what it really means to be in this like a human experience and how authentic is that experience and whenever i try to like literally like wrap my mind around it i can't so and so speaking to people like you like i said a combination of those two things it just kind of like like i said it raises my level of anxiety for recording these things well we're gonna make it easy uh we you know i i'm right on board with you in the sense that uh i've been at this brain thing professionally for 30 years in fact 30 years ago i became uh i had my first faculty job

and i've worked all over the country university of oregon missouri dartmouth uh umass uh and you know uh i'm still in awe of the brain every single day and the fact that my brain is sitting here talking to your brain is kind of still hard for me to believe so very good you know you mentioned a lot of different roles that you served uh professionally so that the audience can get to know you just a little bit better and kind of expand on the the intro that i'll record after the fact sure give us just a brief background of your academic career and then also what your new venture is because i'm actually quite interested in this professionally because i think there'll be a lot of commonality there yeah wonderful so for the last 30 years of my life i've been an academic uh psychologist and neuroscientist i have a degree a PhD in experimental psychology and did a lot of work in human behavior and neuroscience when the this amazing new technologies became available in the 1990s to image brain activity functional mri in particular i went back left my tenure track job went back to being sort of a student a post uh doctoral student and uh learn those new technologies is uh and really spent about seven years up at dartmouth college learning how do we study brain uh anatomy and brain activity when people are engaged in different kinds of cognitive activities and perceptual activities and motor

activities and uh that was something i continued forward and went to the university of oregon you know great school for running um and i ran uh not only was i a faculty member there but i directed their research brain imaging center and then finally was recruited to the university of missouri to do a very similar task help build this center up and and um run it there and my own research interests have always been centered squarely in how does the brain plan and control our actions in the world and then the flip side of that how do our actions our behaviors reshape that brain so that's been my focus uh and most of the work that i've done has been published in the academic theater but i've also had a role writing um and doing some consulting i consulted at the olympic training center in the 90s for the fledgling effort to build a uh coaching credentialing system for usa triathlon i think it was called tri fed back then and then i um i've also did some writing for a magazine at the time called inside triathlon which was one of the original triathlon magazines my last name at the time was johnson i changed it to fry which is my mom's maiden name uh to keep that that name alive so uh so that if people wanted to look for that stuff that's where they would look for it and i've started a new business i decided that i uh i needed to to break it up and have some new challenges so after 30 years in academia

seeing all these wonderful opportunities to connect science with real world applications in the in the area of mental performance uh i i decided to leave my academic post and and i started a company called cerebralperformance.com and it's through that company that i'm going to try to really put neuroscience into action and when you say put it into action is it along a specific like cohort of people are you talking about athletes or like high performers in business or the military are you going to try to like gather them all and use the same techniques across all those different people yeah i'm most excited to work with uh people like you and me who are athletes and also have complex multifaceted lives that we're interested in performing well in and uh in order to perform well in those various roles we have to uh have an integration of those things so we're really different perhaps than you know a professional athlete who can focus all of their energy for a relatively brief period of time in most cases on just doing that in recovery i'm really interested in the folks who are are seeking uh to balance their athletic performance with their performance uh in their other roles of life as well i think you're going to get a lot of business because it is a tremendous there's a tremendous amount of interest in that area right now as i'm sure you're very well aware of and i've always felt i'm going to steer this back to our audience i've always felt that

ultra runners are like the perfect guinea pigs for this stuff because it's an event that's long it's arduous there's a lot of time to quote unquote be in your head and there's a lot of more particular from the performance perspective there's a lot of the performance context that can't be explained by the traditional physiological routes muscle fatigue and glycogen depletion and task management and things like that and whenever that's the case we kind of come back to you know what the brain has a large role in these types of performance outcomes but before we get to this one of the things that i've really appreciated about hearing you speak and reading a lot of your work is the way you're able to kind of simplify the way that the way that this mysterious organ as i described it earlier actually works and the fact that it's a prediction machine is the way that i've heard you talk about it before can you describe the audience with like what you mean by that and why we can view the brain in this very specific and somewhat simplified role yeah so the way i like to think about it is that our behavior right whether it's running an ultra or having this conversation is really a product of three different things there is all of the sensory feedback that we're getting right the sights the sounds the smells the body sensations that we're getting that's being used and integrated by the brain along with our past experiences right what do we know about being in this particular context you do a lot of

podcasts i've been doing some podcasts i kind of know how it goes i'm getting a sense you really know how it goes because you're a pro and an expert in this well you've got a lot more experience than i do jason so um so that's the second thing right we've got experience uh and and that helps to contextualize what we can expect this to be like right and then the final thing and this gets left out all the time is that the brain is constantly trying to predict what's coming next now people who study movement know a lot about this right that on a subconscious level when you control a movement just imagine a stride and running it's not just a matter of using sensory feedback right because the brain requires time to process that right there's a lag in those neural impulses as they move for the brain just like there would be in electrical impulses in a wire you don't want to be waiting for that feedback to be adjusting your gate to jump over the log that's in the trail in front of you you've also got to be compensating that gate in a predictive way so we're but that is a kind of a little practical example that hopefully your audience can relate to um it's happening in the background you're not thinking about that for the most part we're doing that all the time we're constantly integrating all of the sensory information we're getting with our past experiences and using that information along with uh with uh other cognitive

sorts of things that we built up over time to try to predict what's going to happen next that's the prediction machine and a lot of this big wrinkled cerebral cortex that that humans have in such abundance is devoted to doing just that so within this prediction model or this prediction machine that you've described if we boil it down into athletic an athletic context and we can take the whole swath of athletic context whether it's a mixed martial arts fight which i'm a big mixed martial arts fan all the way to ultra marathon that's a big spectrum there yeah are there ways in which that predictive machine or that prediction machine serves us better or worse depending upon either the type of task that we're doing and or the duration of the tasks that we're doing because what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to set up how the brain works and then funnel it eventually into an ultra marathon perspective but are there better or worse scenarios or how does it act differently i guess across some of those broad swaths of athletic tasks that we typically think about yeah so uh your audience may be familiar with ideas like the central governor concept right uh popularized by tim noakes actually uh it was talked about by a guy named archibald hill in the 1800s who won a nobel prize in physiology in 1922 um so it's an old idea right people have been debating our our our is our sense of effort and how far we can push our sense of fatigue controlled centrally

or controlled by feedback coming from the muscles uh marcora has come up with a kind of variation on that and when i look at those two theories i i see them both uh integrating the perceptual part that i was just talking about uh but i see a complete absence of this notion of prediction which we know is so fundamental to uh the control of our actions and our behavior and so i think this is a very important missing component some of the phenomena that have been used in support say of the central governor concept or this idea that the brain is really regulating effort that it's all happening there um in my uh in in from my perspective really are uh supportive of this notion of just how important prediction is right so you take cyclists you put them on an ergometer in the lab you have them cycle and they're getting toward exhaustion you have them rinse their mouth with a carbohydrate solution not taking any calories and what does the brain do it lets them go a little further it says you know there's there's food coming on board i can i'm not going to deplete myself i can go a little bit better there are a bunch of of these kinds of manipulations now in the literature some of the best are just manipulating feedback right um you can uh play games where people's perception of how hard they're going and the feedback that they're getting are disconnected somewhat i mean we did an experiment in the lab years ago where we put people in the brain

imaging machine and we had them reaching and manipulating in a kind of fine motor control task and we their their image of themselves that they were getting back through video was just subtly delayed so there was a disconnect between what they were seeing in terms of feedback and what they were feeling they were doing so they really had to lean heavily on prediction and people are really good at that we and they didn't notice a delay of up to and over a tenth of a second so there's a lot of a lot of slop in the system right there's a lot of room for us to start to think about how can we manipulate feedback how can we change the context in ways that allow people to go a little bit further to push a little bit more into the to the zone of discomfort and uncertainty and i think there's going to be a lot of breakthroughs in that area in the coming years you know you mentioned some of markora's work and i always kind of come back to one of the one of the phenomenons that he's described very well and i can't remember if he was the original person to do this or not but i'm going to give him credit anyway because i've been trying to control him to come on this podcast for a while so maybe this will like butter him up a little bit all right but he turned it the perceived exertion endpoint interaction which i'm always fascinated with how some of these scientists like come up with these things and they describe it exactly how it is but in essence it it describes the one of the ways that we use prediction to modulate effort is that while we are doing a task and in particular a maximum exertion task so a 20 kilometer time trial or a 10

minute all-out effort or a marathon or something like that we're constantly drawing a line internally in our own heads between where our exertion is at at the present moment and what we predict it to be at the end and we use that line and it's usually an upward slope i'm right now at a rate of perceived exertion of eight and at the end i want to be at a 10 we're constantly using the slope of that line to adjust our intensity along the course of that task so that it doesn't exceed what we perceive to be our maximum tolerable exertion and when i first read that it made a lot of sense to me because you know the long time runners will know that if you've run on a track for any appreciable amount of time you can nail your splits without any sort of external assistance or cueing or times or a watch or anything like that because you're just so in tuned with how long the task duration is and how hard you can how hard you can run but that perceived exertion endpoint interaction as it relates to ultra marathon starts to break down because the duration between the point that you're currently at in this predictive point at the end is sometimes hours maybe even days apart and we've all been through the experience at least in the ultra marathon world where we have seen or been the runner that has dropped out at an aid station and immediately regretted it because they realize that the situation that

they're in is not as dire as they thought it was 10 or 10 or 15 minutes ago and i'm wondering how like how do you how like how do you view that how do you view this task regulation in this predictive model across mainly the duration spectrum given the fact that we're talking to an audience that has a lot that has like really long duration events yeah so i'm gonna draw a little bit on my background as a scientist but also a little bit on my background as someone who's done a lot of endurance events uh probably on the light side compared to the the hardcore long distance ultras i've i've been up to 50k guy and uh and that was a sweet spot for me so anytime you're making a prediction right the further out you're making that prediction the uh the less the more margin for error there's going to be right think about the weather forecast we can look on our phones now and get a pretty good weather forecast i'm thinking about you know uh when i was a kid the weather forecast seemed to be almost random right um now it's kind of amazing i know that you know tomorrow i can plan a long training ride and the chance of you know thunder showers in the afternoon is x they're pretty amazing it's gotten really good right we can forecast all sorts of things we can forecast the aurora when it when we can expect to go out and see the northern lights with reasonable accuracy it's amazing right but the longer out those forecasts go the less accurate they are so it's the same thing

right when i think of an ultra where you've got all of these variables coming into play uh fueling being a huge one hydration being a huge one right um as well as the kind of black box stuff that happens in your mind when you're out there experiencing that kind of prolonged effort there's a lot of things that can throw those predictions off so what i like to think about in terms of thinking about this as a brain scientist is that there the brain is constantly making these predictions over different frames of time right i gave you an example early on very mindless kind of a non-exciting example that's what a lot of us do in the lab right pretty basic stuff that we can control but you're constantly making these predictions just to control your movement smoothly if you controlled your movements based on feedback they'd be horribly hurt herky jerky and so forth um it's the prediction right that gets better and better as we acquire a skill and that's why movements get smoother and more fluid as we acquire a skill that's happening in the background the longer term predictions as we get further out start to have more of a conscious component as well right you start to doubt your predictions you start to question your training those are all going to impact your performance and i think simply if we kind of bring it into the real world for people to take home realizing that that is a natural byproduct of this

long duration prediction process if i can coin that term right long duration prediction process realize that's not an acronym yeah we'll come up with it after the fact and i'll submit the trademark pretty soon so nobody else can steal it from us but if we realize that that's going on and we kind of like normalize it to a certain extent during a race i think that that's the real learning lesson there in terms of how to improve performance in that particular context is there anything else that that the athletes and the coaches out there that are listening should actually take away from that phenomenon in order to either counsel themselves or counsel their athletes as they're entering these events yeah i think that uh what you say is right on target right there's really two things going on there is there is the information and the prediction that's arising from that information and then there's your emotional and cognitive reaction to that right it's a lot like pain you know we know that the kind of activities that we're drawn to and we could get into like that right who are these people who are we the people who seek out these kind of experiences that put us in the discomfort zone regularly but with pain we've got two things going on and there are two uh relatively independent brain systems that are involved in this one is processing the sensory information that's giving us the sensations but then layered on top of that is the emotional system the emotional reaction to that pain if people start

feeling that they're in an unsafe place okay and you look at their their um ratings of pain they go through the roof right as opposed to if we are feeling where i've been here before this is a i know this is uncomfortable right the sensation is the same how you interpret it is critical i think we could normalize uh that by by helping athletes develop comfort being in those places and the same for these kind of uh other things that start to go on when we start to really uh let our let our minds start to get in the way of it you know you so you just opened up the pandora's box of pain and so i'd be remiss if we didn't spend the next like two hours however long we've got this podcast book for talking about that because i know it's a fascination of yours and it's a fascination of not only mine but all the silly sadistic ultra runners that are like like listening to this and i was really struggling with a way to to kind of kick this part of the conversation off and so what i think i'll do is i'll use a recent meta-analysis that came out that i shared with you that you're probably familiar uh familiar with where they looked at studies where they had used something like a nerve block to block the feedback coming back from the muscles and so the person doing the task usually a cycling task or something like that because it's easy to you know manipulate people in that uh in that modality they have no sensory feedback on what's going on at the level of the muscle yet it did not reduce their perception of their exertion they still had the same rpe essentially

across these tasks and when i when i first when i saw this and it wasn't that that long ago it was just a few months ago i just kept thinking to myself this is another thing that flies in the face of how i was originally trained as a coach where there was something going on at the level of the muscle fiber that was causing us to experience pain that was part of our experience of how we regulate effort and so i want i wanted to use that as a little bit of a backdrop of like how do you go about explaining our relationship to pain and where it generates from and what are some of the things that influence it in a in a endurance setting yeah so this is a great topic and we all know that getting the best out of ourselves uh in the context of running or any of these other endurance activities requires getting comfortable with pain and being able to push through that and also being able to differentiate pain that accompanies effort from pain that accompanies injury and that's a very important skill for athletes to develop pain inherently is subjective um so i can't tell the level of pain you're experiencing and you can't tell the the level of pain that i'm experiencing in any kind of objective way you just have to rely on what i tell you right um you know the state of the art i run these uh multi-million dollar brain imaging centers and we have no tests that we can bring you in put a put you in our mri

machine scan your brain and say oh his pain's a five on a scale of one to ten uh there's no test for that the state of the art in pain research is just simply a scale it's like what you see when you go to the doctor's office right the little smiley face going to the to the sort of recoiling and that's all we've got to offer right um kind of amazing when pain is such a such a a major thing that is devoted you know how much time and effort and money to trying to understand so that's what i'm going to do it the next time i'm at an ultra is i'm just going to sit in an aid station with a little emoji scale and just how do you feel how do you feel boom when we'll just do a survey there no i think that actually that's that that would be very interesting because you know what's what's remarkable about that uh you hit on i hit on a great way to think about this for for the audience people would give you that rating and then they'd pop and slam a gel and about five minutes later or 10 minutes later they give you a completely different rating even if they're putting out the same effort and or more right i was on a long bike ride about 80 miles yesterday and i ha i didn't fuel it particularly well and i had some of those low points and i looked uh you know i felt pretty bad a few times and i was like oh yeah i know this this is the under fueled feeling where everything starts to feel horrible and you know uh the the first thing that people experience usually is that things start to deteriorate mentally they start to notice they're feeling a little down right they don't

maybe want to be there they're not as enthusiastic uh about holding the pace so i think the important part here is again what you mentioned right there's the sensation of the pain there's not much we can do about that we can bring elite athletes into the lab and what we find is that they can tolerate more pain but it's not because they don't feel the pain it's that they can contextualize it in a way that allows them to move through it they're not different than you and i um in that regard right so when you block the pain from the muscle sensory feedback people still are experiencing effort right because presumably that that's more evidence that it's being constructed in the brain or centrally um and and there there are issues with those studies there there there's uh you know the debate has been going on for 100 years yeah exactly that it's not over but um trust me we'll come back 20 years from now and like have a completely different perception of it because you and i we've been through all the iterations i mean i've been through the central governor iteration and now this next permutation that marcora came up with and then five years later there'll be there'll be another wrinkle in it so of course it's always going to happen yeah i mean we still don't really have a great understanding of why uh a mentally demanding day makes you feel fatigued it's it's we're there's some new data suggesting there's an accumulation of glutamate which is neurotransmitter in the areas of the brain that

have been overworked that's also going on when you're trying to get the best out of yourself in an ultra right so there's that side of things too what is trainable is not the sensory side it is the uh reaction the emotional component the thinking component the feeling component of how you react to that pain and you and i and and your audience when we go out and do hard training sessions we are training ourselves to get comfortable in that place we're training our muscle fibers we're training our cardiovascular system we play so much attention to that right what now we can measure lactate mobily i mean it's amazing we've got all this data right but without the without the mental side of things it's not really that important people will say you know well what what is the best training program are you a polarized guy are you an interval guy and i i always tell them and i'm dead serious it's the one you'll stick with right yeah um you're these these training programs are are only as good as the application of them but there's a huge mental component to uh being able to get comfortable with the discomfort and that's what we can learn and we get that through our training ideally i wanted to get your further a little bit of further perspective on this because it my in my experience when i work with athletes they go through two fairly distinctive phases

with relationship to their relationship with pain and the first one is just tolerance you have an athlete that's probably never worked out before or you get somebody who's you know just starting an exercise program they just learn to tolerate more discomfort right a higher rating of perceived exertion higher levels of exertion and then they train for three or four maybe six years kind of that medium time frame and then they move on to regulation so they're able to regulate these higher levels of pain to a certain degree and the mastery of that regulation ends up becoming the separator of performance and we see this all the time when we try to translate lab data into real world performance is there's a very asymptotic relationship between the total amount of time that you've trained for when you scale it out to years and your physiological improvement we can bring somebody into our lab and you know they'll improve for a year maybe two years maybe three years and by the fourth year it's like the you know the error of the instrumentation is you know the way is fourfold different than the and then the amount that they're actually improving yet yet we continue to see improvements in performance particularly in the measured events 10 000 meters marathon and things like that and so there's something going on besides the physiology of it right and i've always theorized and not just me a lot of other people have theorized that the way that they can regulate their effort and as part of that

the way that they can kind of regulate the pain that they can tolerate or the effort that they can tolerate as part of that separator i was wondering in your experience have you seen that same trajectory of athletic development in terms of people's relationship with pain where it changes during the kind of the time frame of their athletic time span yeah i think what you're saying is great this is an example where brain science and exercise science can be so wonderfully complimentary like hand in a glove right because in the exercise science world you can you can really measure things like a person's vo2 max and you you can measure their maximal output in power and really quantify that objectively again on the on the pain side the effort side it's all subjective right so if you see that someone's vo2 max is not going up right that their fitness indicators as measured in exercise science lab are asymptotic like you're saying and yet they're getting better what's going on what else is what else is there there isn't a lot of other stuff right you know um i my favorite book about that i used a lot actually when i was training uh and running was a book by jack daniels and there's a quote in there somewhere um and daniels is such a thoughtful guy and he was saying you know here's here are some ways to differentiate whether you or your athletes are are are getting better because you're getting

fitter versus just able to tolerate more suffering right um there is something to be said for that and you know i've had the pleasure of of competing in a number of sports i was a runner then i was a triathlete in the 90s uh cross-country skier and cyclist now and in all those sports i've also had the pleasure of knowing some pretty elite athletes and having conversations with them about this and to the one the uh none of them report that it gets any easier right than it gets any less painful you just go faster for for that so learning to tolerate that learning to get comfortable right if i bring you to the lab and we uh inflict some pain on you right which we've done in my lab you know one of the classic ways is putting your arm in a bucket of ice water and seeing how long you can do it i mean very low tech right we've got other other devious ways of inflicting pain on people but this is an easy one to think about you know um we can we can really quantify how long you can tolerate something like that and we can show what kind of variables really affect that and there are a number of things that will really decrease your ability to tolerate that one is being sleep deprived another is uh anything that invokes anxiety or stress right so those are two things to be thinking about when you're trying to get the most out of yourself in your training or in your racing right can you are there things you

could be doing to to decrease um to decrease those kind of other things so another another interesting one is um we all kind of have this this limited capacity to pay attention to something right what did you say uh yeah exactly and i fell for it too how many times right if you do it again i'll probably take the bait um i'm a little slow like that but you know uh there's we have a limited bandwidth right if you're trying to get the most out of yourself and you're racing hard you want that bandwidth devoted to everything you can do to move yourself toward that finish line more quickly now um you uh if you put someone in a situation where you tie that bandwidth up in these kind of context of pain one of the things that can happen is that you know they they their ability to uh persevere through the pain can be affected okay so how can we lower our cognitive reserve or or or not lower but maximize our cognitive reserve how much of that reserve can we devote to the important task at hand right how can we make it feel more comfortable and less stressful little things can make a huge difference here um sleep is is uh something that we can try to take some degree of control over although um probably not the night before an event for many athletes but we can

we can build up toward that right we can practice experiencing the kind of discomfort we're going to do on race day um and you know we can we can really take advantage of of some of these things that we know in the lab modulates that perception of how you're experiencing the pain well and i'll add a third one in there a fourth one i can't remember how many mitigation strategies you just went through going back to we can only pay attention for so long scott um in terms it's race season everybody's thinking about race execution stuff right now one of the things that constantly comes up that i harp on a tremendous amount and what you just the dialogue that you just went through really emphasizes why that this is important everything for in your race day strategy needs to be as automated as possible as little brain cycles as you can devote to when do i take my gel how you know am i going to change shoes here or there where's the next aid station like all of these little things that we don't appreciate how much they actually affect the end race performance is illustrated really well by these cognitive load types of experiments that you and your colleagues have done over years where they intentionally like you know reduce or they intentionally uh stress the cognitive load before a task and you know lo and behold the task performance is usually usually if not always worse after that after that stressful period which on the surface seems benign because it's not like you're doing a time trial to exhaustion right before another time trial to exhaustion you're actually you're

asking people to match up words and colors and things like that that don't seem very physically demanding yet it has a market impact on performance yeah so uh that that's so well put and uh i think another thing i'd like to add here that is that is an actionable thing and may may actually be something that many ultra runners uh don't think so much about which is the warm-up that you do so um i know uh when i when i was competing in running i depending on the race i had to race duration the event i had different warm-up strategies so if it was a 5k on the track it was a very different protocol than it was if it was a 50k on a trail right i'm sure that your athletes who tend to gravitate toward these longer events they might use the first mile of the event as their warm-up now here's something interesting there have been some good studies looking at pre-conditioning pain right what can people tolerate more pain if you've given them some some brief but but intense doses of the kind of pain that they're going to be experiencing the actual test right before the test and the answer is yes you can pre-condition kind of reset that thermostat a little bit over about how you're going to respond to the pain um by getting a little taste of it so i do a lot of bike racing now and in the bike racing world the warm-ups tend to be a little more structured i would say than they are in the distance running world

we go out we we really do some pretty hard efforts right before a race in in most cases we think about that is getting the the metabolism up and going getting the cardiovascular system going moving moving up and down uh through the different heart rate zones and stuff and that's all happening but what's happening in parallel is that we're pre-conditioning the pain i completely believe this and so i think uh ultra runners might want to think a little bit about that now obviously you can't pre-condition the pain that starts to set in when you be grinding at it for a bunch of hours and i'm not suggesting that but i am suggesting that it might be worth experimenting a little bit with some hard intense efforts even before a long event to really start to get your brain ready for this is what's gonna happen right so what i was gonna ask you that's related to that is is that phenomenon the same dependent upon if the exertion is being dictated by intensity or by volume because those are two very different relationships and i'm gonna say types of pain i don't know if that's the right vocabulary but we all know that an 800 meter race which everybody you know considers one of the hardest races in the world to actually run the the pain that you experience during that is markedly different than at the end of the leadville trail 100 where you're hauling up power line at a snail's pace it's

not very fast it's not very intense yet it's it's quote-unquote painful nonetheless are those types of pre-conditioning pain strategies would you imagine that that they're the same given it's more of a duration dependent experience that we're having i think it's a great question i um i don't see a good way to um give yourself a a preconditioning taste of the kind of 50k before 50k yeah we're having this conversation the other day and coming up with ways to think about uh different types of pain pain has all these qualitative dimensions right um when i worked in the lab i worked a lot with people who had chronic pain uh like phantom limb pain who in amputees right and we would do these assessments is the pain burning is it throbbing is it gnawing a lot of those dimensions also are applicable to what we're talking about here the 800 meters is horrible right um you know i used to do those uh for my speed workouts on the track and the you know but racing it's a whole a whole other world yeah no it's it's an it's an incredible thing and the first you know 600 meters is often fantastic and then and then the bear gets on the back and it's it's pretty awful but um but very different than what you're going to experience in an ultra i think the the qualitative sense of those pain uh experiences are different surely there's more inflammatory pain and uh we have in our in our pain detection sensory system the nociceptive

system there are different sensors in your body that detect different things including acidity and inflammation along with pressure which is kind of mechanical force thermal uh burn and so forth right in a long event you're you're in the leadville you've got to climb the power line um you're going to have a lot of inflammatory stuff going on in the body by that point surely right as well as mechanical and so forth um having having preconditioned yourself during the warm-up i think it's an open question whether short bouts of intensity might be useful for kind of setting that thermostat i think it's an open question we have no data to address that at all a really cool concept because once again harping back on my coach education that's going back you know over two decades now the way that you described why we warm up is to the dotted i and the cross t exactly how i was trained we want to warm up because we want to increase blood flow and we want to get a little bit of lactate going and then you lubricate the joints and the muscle temperature is higher all of these very classic physiological phenomenons that are going on that are supposed to improve the performance that is going to that is going to follow the warm-up but we never and i can i can profess to this at least in my education which i would consider relatively robust never thought once about this preconditioning aspect that uh uh that

you mentioned yet it is a very real phenomenon now that we've kind of done the experiments behind it and it also makes a lot of sense you know what else it'll do it'll really shake up your competition if you start if you start doing if you start doing strides off the starting line of your 24-hour race right like like you're going out for the the uh halloween 10k that's gonna shake that shit up right now we're blending psychology into the mix as well so we'll have the confidence of everything that's so brilliant they're gonna think you're either completely deranged and they're gonna blow or or you're a real badass but you know if they ask you what's going on after the race and you did really well you can tell them you know it's all in the warm-up there you go all in the warm-up i uh i increased my pain tolerance or whatever the clinical version of that is during during the warm-up itself or i preconditioned uh they'll only laugh once yeah there you go that's true that's true okay i want to get your thoughts on something else um one of the things that's always been a fascination of mine during the course of my coaching career and the long-time listeners this podcast are probably rolling their eyes right now because half of the content that i produce is just satiating my own curiosity and this is definitely one of them is the time course for adaptation and we put all of this we put all of this effort into how long does it take mitochondrial biogenesis to happen and if we impose a strength training stimulus when are we actually going to see the the the bones get stronger and the tendons and ligaments to get

stronger and things like that and we have fairly good literature to back up on to say okay listen you know these are for the most part chronic processes right they're not happening on the course of an hour or a day or even several days they're several months is not several several years in the making what can we say about our relationship to pain and how humans adapt to either this preconditioning piece that you're just talking about or chronic exposure to it or just our relationship with it is there an equivalent that we can make that would speak to this time course for adaptation yeah i think it's probably a two-fold process and i think there are fast adaptations and slow adaptations and i love i love the way you've described uh describe this in in from the your perspective which is exercise science so we all know or many of us know the experience we go to the weight room right a lot of us go reluctantly it's good to go we should go we know we should go we go there and we we we lift right and uh we we kind of get a sense of what our current base level strength is and then after like a week right once the dawn sort of subsides right uh all of a sudden you get this huge bump in your strength like whoa what's that well what it isn't are those things you were mentioning before what it is is better ability to recruit the motor units right so that those signals

coming out of your motor cortex volleying down your spinal cord and out into your peripheral muscles to those to those muscle fibers all of a sudden you're recruiting more of your muscle mass and you get huge bump in your strength gains and then after that right once you've once you've kind of harvested that then you make progress because you're changing the muscle physiology right and that's the slow thing and i think that's a great analogy for what's going on in our pain tolerance i think that we we see new runners and i remember being a new runner you know i'm 58 i ran my first uh 10k race probably you know a little over 40 years ago i was in my late teens late bloomer for running but i remember thinking oh my god why would anyone do this to themselves this is horrible right it was terrible but uh i went and did it again the next weekend right because our memory for pain is also an interesting thing it fades pretty quickly which is you know why yeah anyway um you get that adaptation pretty quickly in new runners they start to realize they can go a little further with less timidity than than they thought but then i also think there's a long-term thing that we're all kind of experiencing we can probably all reflect on that time when we went a little further than we had before one of my professional

cycling friends uh says you know there's that threshold for pain and you you go right up against it and you're racing you go and then you learn that there's another place you can go just beyond that right and i think that requires time to get to an experience and getting again this is you know right out of the pain research right pain is a not about muscle is not about physical damage pain is a warning signal to prevent you from harming yourself as you get more comfortable and you understand you know i've been here before i'm not going to injure myself doing this i'm not going to kill myself i'm not going to have a cardiac arrest you can go a little further and a little further but that requires time right and you've got to dose that out so uh if you're not doing intensity work you should be right if you're just doing long runs you've got to get that intensity work and no matter what the distance is of your events i believe that very strongly um and you've also got to get comfortable being in that place of that that gnawing long-term pain of of climbing power line in the leadville i love that you mentioned power line everybody loves that clive you know how this actually shows up uh from a practical standpoint with the people that i work with this short-term long-term piece of it is that is with athletes that have gone through a collegiate track and field and cross-country program because they have been to

the places beyond the places that they thought that they could that they could go speaking to your professional cyclist friend because of the environment that they're in right they're in a team of people they're all pushing themselves really hard they're pushing themselves beyond what they would be able to push themselves if they were just out there individually and i actually coach those athletes not so much from a program well from a programming standpoint too but that's neither here nor there but from how i describe how to you know how to measure your effort and things like that i describe that a whole lot differently with athletes that have that experience because they have the whole range right versus athletes that don't have that experience because they don't know what they don't know right so you got to kind of take them there first and then explain what the range is versus the athletes that have already been there you don't have to go through that whole first process they've gone through this kind of like two-phase process that you mentioned earlier you know who comes to mind when you're talking about this are people who grew up as swimmers swimmers right i mean that system starts very young right and it is a grinder full of uh hard intervals where these kids learn to tolerate pain and when you look and i'm kidding around a little bit but you know if you look at when when swimmers transition to other things they transition to running cycling triathlon not only do they have a big engine right a lot of them but man they've got the mindset right because they spent the last 15 years grinding

out interval workouts it's all interval workouts yeah it's all interval workouts all the time and volume it's like the best i mean it's the best example of smashing together volume and intensity all the time all the time and you're not gonna you're not gonna break yourself because you're in a relative microgravity environment right so there's really no your knee's not going to stop you yeah okay so let's pivot a little bit because i kind of want to get to to really brass tacks here and i think that this might be a good transition and you can plug your new business venture all you want to because i imagine you're going to get these people you're going to get these people in the door because i think that this is it's it's topical and it's a big performance enhancer so this audience is going to be training for summer events yeah they're doing all the physical stuff some of their hay or a lot of their hay might already be in the barn right depending upon when their event actually is what they can what can they do from a practical standpoint from your experience from your wheelhouse to become better later in the race when pain and all and a lot of this neurobiology and this neurology starts to become more of a performance factor for them given the fact that we're doing long duration races is there anything that they can consciously do in training to help modulate that and or anything that they can do during the actual races to to improve their performance well a couple of thoughts um the first is something that i think uh they shouldn't bother with and and this is probably going to stir up some

controversy with people but i'm going to we're going to put it out there you know i think sitting down and working through book uh workbook exercises about mental performance and positive mindset for competition and stuff is probably a waste of time and here's why i think that um one thing that we know about how human beings learn is that it's very hyper specific and context dependent so uh if you want to learn a piece of information if you want to learn a new skill uh you need to do that thing and you uh that carries over to our running yeah we should be practicing these mental skills that we want to have available to us on race day while we're training not in the evening right use your evening to foam roll or stretch or whatever that's great eat a ton of food because that's really good but when you're training you need to realize that uh two things are going on and i'm kind of separating those in this kind of false dichotomy but there's you're you're doing the physical training but the mental training is happening as well and i think we put all our attention on the physical side i'm going to run these intervals and i'm going to do them at this pace and this is going to train my uh this system and that system energy systems that's fantastic but i think athletes would do really well to put some conscious processing time into thinking about what are the mental skills that i need to execute this training well and how do those

skills how can i improve those skills so i have them on race day let me give you an easy example um there's a big difference between an interval based training program and a kind of polarized based training program right or between a threshold oriented training program and a polarized training program there's differences physiologically and people are debating and arguing and we've seen this cycle go around in the in the history of running for a long time it's fascinating to me i've been around a long time we've had a lot of those debates on my podcast yeah yeah it's a lively topic i think debate debate is a good thing um and i've lived through a couple of those different things through arthur lidyer was the guy who guided my training when i when i was early on and uh you know but but look um where was i going with this oh attention right yeah i'm having a little lapse the brain guy's having a little lapse in his attention i think that a lot of uh a lot of importance here would be uh to think about what the mental skills are to execute the different kinds of training you're doing right this the mental skills that you need to execute an interval day are very different than the mental skills you need to execute a proper distance day and actually devoting some conscious attention to that when you're getting ready to go out the door and when you're in the middle of it whatever that is to tune into that

and not not to tune out but really tune in how does this feel now i'm in the the second or third hour of my long you know endurance run this is what it's going to be like when i do a race any kind of race simulation stuff that you can fit into that right uh maybe you decide to put some intensity efforts into those long runs not enough that you you end up you know needing two two weeks to recover from your your long training run but enough so that you taste what it's going to be like to move at race pace on tired on a tired body and a tired mind fuel it like you're going to do for race day race simulation doesn't just mean simulating the physical experience it means simulating some part of the mental experience as well so i think that's critically important and i think uh i think a lot of coaches maybe don't pay as much attention to that as they do to the to the physiology physiology of these things but look we all know without the mental component you can be at your fittest right and you can drop out of a race you can underperform the mental component to me is the base of the performance period pyramid we often treat it like up here and if you read books about training in all these different sports a lot of times it's like the last chapter oh and then there's the mental side and uh you know do this do that but we can do better right we actually do have a lot that we do understand about

the brain and how it relates to behavior and it's i think they're the reason i moved into uh moved out of academia right and writing papers for the 10 other people that are interested in what i do in that world which is the nature of being a scientist in academia is because i see so much room for application right and i'm i'm really enthusiastic about uh being able to do that so cerebralperformance.com i'll plug plug the new endeavor is uh where that is going to be the clearinghouse for doing that uh working on a book proposal now that is going to start to really put the neuroscience into that uh whereas it's it's been largely absent even in the sports psychology world there's a lot of touching on the brain as well we know this stuff is coming from the brain we can do better right we actually do know something about the biology now i think what i'm taking the biggest thing that i'm taking away from that that i'll implement with athletes is the specificity side of it or the hyper specificity side of it because we kind of think of physio like physiology is physiology is physiology you have aerobic physiology you can kind of translate up and down the intensity spectrum to to a large degree you know fitness is fitness is the classic phrase that gets thrown around but when you're talking about specific cognitive or mental skills to deploy this that specificity actually matters a lot it might matter more than the physical specificity you know in trail running we talk about physical specificity in terms of elevation gain and elevation loss and are you going to use poles

and how steep is the terrain and how technical is the terrain like that those components of specificity this might be a case where the mental skills that you apply and the things that you do in that realm might need to be more specific than the specificity that we're applying on a physical side that's kind of what i'm taking from you am i interpreting that correctly i think you're interpreting it exactly as it was intended and i think it is the most fertile ground where the big improvements are going to come from look if you look at elite athletes for the most part they're all doing the same thing they might be yeah they might have a favorite workout right that they go to and things and i can speak to this from you know the different sports that i've done in the endurance realm they're all doing the same thing the differentiator is going to come from this brain side of things right and we don't just have to talk about the brain anymore like oh and then there's the brain and in a kind of metaphorical way there's a whole huge world of neuroscience there are a lot of mysteries i'll be the first to admit we have far more that we don't know about the brain than that we do know but we do know some things and this hyper specificity thing is enormous you know talk to anybody who studies how we learn a motor skill and what they'll tell you is none of it transfers it's actually a huge frustration right one of my interests in my research was rehabilitation what can we do for people who've had neurological injuries or disease are there things we can train them on that will then be transferable to help them improve

something that that is they have a deficit in and it's really frustrating because there's not a lot of transfer right and i think these mental skills are the same we've got to start incorporating these in a deliberate way in a hyper specific way if we want to get the most out of ourselves when we're in the competition it's not something to invent on the fly on the race day and it's not something to sit at home you know filling out some worksheets about that's great it's better than nothing but we can do better i i really appreciate that i'm gonna give you the last word on something because i have a lot of physiology based colleagues and i'll raise my hand i'm probably in this cohort as well and i'm sure you've heard from these people kind of like ad nauseum and they listen to the sport side and the neuro side and everything they say yeah yeah yeah yeah i get it but yet still we're not jedis in star wars star wars is one of my favorite you know my my kind of my favorite entertainment things i'll absorb any of their content whenever it kind of comes out and we can't fly through the air using just our minds there has to be some sort of physiological grounding to it so you spoke to this a little bit earlier what do you like what do you say to that like you put mental skills at the bottom of the pyramid but yet there are a lot of people that say listen you still have to have a raw physiological capacity in order to transport yourself via your feet or your bike or in the pool or wherever

from point a to point b under a certain period of time there's still some physiological underlying mechanism that kind of has to transpire like what would you what do you say to those people that kind of come back with the hey we're not jedis and we can't teleport ourselves yeah uh well first i will say some of my best friends are exercise physiologists so uh and uh i've sat on a number of exercise science dissertation committees and and uh if it loved that and in all seriousness um i would agree right we can't we if you're not fit you're not going to think yourself through uh the uh western states 100 right there's no fake in it when race day comes around and we're focusing on the long stuff but it's equally true in the short stuff you've got to do the work right what i'm saying is that if the mental component's not there you're also not going to perform right i think it's i i put it as of equal importance and and i see it as the base of the pyramid and here's why i see it that way because you're not going to be able to to execute the physical work you need to do to tune those other systems unless you've got that solid foundation under you i think it's the first piece of the puzzle but we often treat it as an afterthought like it's just going to take care of itself and it might do with that a little bit right but just like you're saying doing the mental stuff and focusing on that is not going to take care of the physiological stuff the physiological stuff and executing those x

the the workouts and things is might take care of the mental stuff but we can do a whole lot better and you're not going to train well unless the mental side is solid right i think there's so much room for improvement there uh it all levels from beginner to olympic right just not that not just the elites right which is what a lot of times we try to confine this to like you you alluded to it earlier right the difference between winning a race getting the gold medal and getting bronze medal or no medal is is likely in a lot of cases just the difference in mental skills that's not the only place where it makes a difference it makes a difference up and down the chain especially if you are a person who enjoys the experience of getting the most out of your training and and out of your out of your competition given whatever other things are going on in your life and this is a big part of what i want to do i want to make this information available to the non-olympic athletes right olympic athletes elite elite elite caliber you know world tour cyclists who are riding the giro right now or the tour de france many of those teams have a mental performance specialist incorporated although you'd be surprised how many don't um so even there there's room for improvement but i'd like to make this as available to people as uh having a coach to write workout schedules has become and you and i have been around for a while that's not been been something that was available to a lot of amateur athletes in our

kinds of sports even in the 80s right it was something that the elites got to have but then this whole thing developed through things like cts and and and independent coaches you know early coaches like joe friel and my friend hank lang and so forth um and now we're able to have this kind of informed way of going about things based on science and information and the guidance of a coach right and you know what i love seeing that develop and this is one of the big reasons why i wanted to bring you on because i know that you're trying to do this i had another colleague of mine justin ross on the podcast maybe four or six weeks ago who's trying to do the same thing he's trying to crack the code in the commercial space right and not not to get too you know business on everybody but to allude to what we did you know 20 years ago is we tried to crack the code on the commercial space within endurance coaching in more of the physiological side granted you know they're professional athletes that had coaches but it was pretty much limited to the professional athletes bringing this into the other realms of sports performance psychology mental skills nutrition and things like that i've loved to see that development because it mirrors my experience when i first got into the when i first got into the this world where there was no marketplace one day within the next day there is a marketplace so you're at the you know you're at the cutting edge of the bleeding edge of that literally right now and i think you're going to crush it man i we're going to come back five years from now and you're going to have 30 you know people underneath you and some sort of like novel structure or whatever i'm going to love to

see that development well thank you for being so supportive and having me on and uh i'll be happy if i can see some of this uh work that we've been doing for you know a long time in the neurosciences have it have an impact in this arena that is so important to me well i will have links in the show notes to everything i encourage everybody to go and check that out is there anything else that you want to leave the listeners with in terms of like pearls of wisdom or nuggets that they can kind of take into their training tomorrow yeah i think uh don't neglect the the uh focus on the mental side and start to really reap the benefits of the physical training you're doing by devoting some energy while you're doing it to developing and sharpening uh those tools as well and good luck in your season enjoy what you're doing because that's ultimately what most of us are after right at some level well put well put thank you for coming on the podcast and more importantly thank you for what you have done and what you've contributed to the space because it's made a big impact on me and thank you for what you are going to do because i know good things are going to come out of it thank you so much all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to dr fry for coming on the podcast today and enlightening us about how our perception of pain is actually generated and how we view perception of effort where it comes from and i hope that each and every one of the listeners out there

can take something from the content within this podcast and directly take it into your training or into a race personally i got so incredibly inspired by the content within this podcast that i decided to do a follow-up podcast that will be released next week with two of our coaches coaches ajw and neil palace we are going to discuss what we took away from this podcast and what we are doing with our athletes differently based on this newfound information or maybe even information that we were just reminded of nonetheless if you found this information interesting please share this podcast with your training partners and your friends there's no better way to tell your friends that you care about their performance and about their training than sharing the knowledge contained within this podcast as always this podcast has brought you without any sponsors or any ads of any in any way shape or form and that is that is solely for the purpose of making sure that the content is as unbiased and as unfiltered as possible i hope you appreciate that long-standing commitment that i've had to the listeners out there that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you