Ultramarathon Nutrition for Training and Racing with Nick Tiller | KoopCast Episode 27

What's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast I am your host Jason Koop and we've got a big one for you today this podcast is clocking in at over three hours and it is all about nutrition for ultra marathon training and nutrition for ultra marathon racing on the podcast today I have Nick Tiller who is the author of this recent position paper that was written in the International Society of Sports Nutrition that's titled nutritional considerations for single stage ultra marathon training and racing it is a big one it's got 197 cited papers in it and 25 authors you can imagine the collective brain power of all those people put together in the same virtual room to come up with one position stand and I remember when I initially found when I came across this paper I actually wrote a summary for it on the CTS website that we will link to in the show notes but that 500 word article or 1500 word article is really not going to do it justice we spend the next three hours trying to do it justice and not only going over aspects of the paper itself which you guys should actually go out and read we not only go over the aspects of the paper itself but we really dive kind of behind it and use our own ultra marathon experience to kind of peel back the research curtain

a little bit and get into some practical advice for all of the listeners out there I've been trying to get this podcast on tap for a very long time we were originally supposed to meet out in California where Nick is a researcher in exercise physiology and respiratory medicine at UCLA we were initially supposed to meet out there but then once the COVID-19 pandemic came around he ended up going back to the UK and then we went back and forth for a while and finally we we decided that we would record this podcast remotely because we were just so enthusiastic about um about getting it done uh in his day-to-day life Nick is not only a ultra marathon runner but he holds a master's and a doctoral degree in human applied physiology and is an accredited physiologist with the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences or BASES and I've had a lot of Brits on the podcast recently I don't know what's up with that exactly but he's a phenomenal researcher and he also puts his research where uh into a practical perspective when he goes out and races ultra marathons which you talk about a lot in the podcast so I had a ton of fun with it and I hope you guys get a lot of information out of this particular podcast we did record it remotely me being in Colorado and him being in the UK and we did have some microphone troubles which my

incredible post-production and editing assistant Michael Carson tried to scrub out as much as possible but there's still there's still going to be some you know blips and blops here and there it's worth it though you guys can put up with it the information should stand on its own two feet so without any further ado here is everything that you need to know about ultra marathon nutrition as it relates to training and racing a conversation that I had with Nick Tiller I've always found you know uh researchers that end up doing either not even meta-analysis but more position papers it's always an interesting proposition because you're not you're not like gathering a group of subjects and bringing them in for an initial evaluation and then doing some intervention with them and then reporting the results you're taking a lot of what's out there and I've always almost likened it to what I do in coaching where we're taking all these different pieces of information and we're kind of like alchemizing it into one you know one kind of consensus so before we like very classically like go for the jugular here um how how did this consensus paper from your perspective like all come to light yeah it was it was a fairly embryonic process I have been running ultra ultra marathon for a long time well over a decade now and before and I was running marathons for about

a decade before that and obviously was very up on the literature I'm an exercise physiologist by profession but I have a deep and active interest in nutrition and I was looking for nutrition resources or physiology and nutrition resources specific to ultra marathon and found a bunch of review articles on ironman triathlon adventure racing and race walking and everything except and ultra endurance exercise in general which I found a bit a bit of a misnomer because ultra endurance exercise is a very broad term I don't know how you can possibly prescribe recommendations for something so broad but there was nothing specific ultra marathon there were a couple of papers that had that had attempted this but but there was no kind of one-stop resource for runners and coaches and medical director race directors and medics who were overseeing these kinds of events and so I decided to write one and and it was very much at the time it was it was my effort to try and bridge the gap between some of the science that is reported in academic literature and the stuff that is applied in the real world because as a runner myself I knew that there wasn't this kind of one central resource that people could look to so I started off writing a review article on the physiology and nutrition of ultra marathon mainly just because I love writing and I'm and

it's something that I'm very passionate about and realized that that is that the physiology and nutrition of ultra marathon is it's way too big for one paper so I split them in two and started and focused on the the nutrition stuff and wrote a review article that I anticipated would get published in somewhere like sports medicine so somewhere that publishes a lot of reviews now as I said I'm not a sports nutritionist by profession so I brought in a good friend and colleague of mine Dr. Justin Roberts from Anglia Ruskin University and I kind of was looking to him just to make sure that the nutritional recommendations were as scientifically robust as they could be there's a bit of a fail-safe for me and he suggested that we turn it into a position stand for the ISSN we contacted the editor and it kind of snowballed from there and then 23 other authors later and about a at about a year's worth of writing and it was ready to go just like that so exactly yeah exactly I was really pleased with with the outcome it's it's as robust as the paper that I wanted to write it's very academically rigorous but also I hope it kind of goes some way to bridging the gap between the the science and the applied stuff well I can tell you first off to the rigor of it you mentioned 23 authors but also 197 individual papers that are cited in this review paper I mean that's a lot that's an enormous amount of reading just in itself I'm surprised that you got it done in a year first off to hear that time frame

and I I'm I'm kind of getting the sense from you that there's another consensus consensus type paper that might be in the works or coming down the pipeline that's specific to the physiology of ultra marathon running yeah and I and I focus because my specialism is is cardiopulmonary physiology so the lab that I work at is a very famous respiratory lab and I'm just about to papers in review at the moment I'm about to publish this paper on the on the cardiopulmonary or the respiratory and cardiovascular implications of ultra marathon running and co-authored that with some experts in the field and I think that's gonna add another you know answer a lot of unknowns about ultra marathon as well so that's kind of in the pipeline but yeah there's there's a lot more work that needs to be done in this there's so much we don't know and and the main thing and and without going off on a tangent but the main thing that that's coming out of this this the paper that's in review at the moment is that there are certain obviously we get we get certain adaptations but certain maladaptations with long-term participation in ultra marathon and we're getting there's enough data now to suggest that it might not be good for you to be running you know 100 mile races every six months for for 10 15 20 years I mean that's pretty intuitive but it but nobody's really been able to quantify what the long-term effect

of actual racing is there's lots of data on people who exercise a lot and some new research from Ben Levine's lab looking at people who exercise for 30 40 hours per week showing that they have no increased risk of cardiovascular disease and no no further increased risk of mortality but what we can't do is actually quantify what the implications of periodic racing actually are because you can exercise for three four hours a day that doesn't subject you to the same physiological stress as running a 24-hour ultra marathon twice a year for example and nobody's really able to quantify what the long-term effects of that are but yeah a lot more work needs to be done I can't wait for it to come out and I mean a lot of the a lot of what you have gone through in terms of you're curious about the research as as it relates to ultra marathon there's not a lot of research out there I mean that is very analogous to what I initially went through as a coach when I started working with ultra marathon athletes because when I before I started working with ultra athletes I worked with runners and triathletes and cyclists and things like that and there was a tremendous body of literature that we could draw from to inform coaching practice but when I started working with ultra runners in kind of the early 2000s just to kind of time stamp it a little bit I had the I used that same process or I tried to use that same process of looking at the literature trying to figure out what's going on using that to inform my practice with

athletes when I transitioned that process into ultra running it was just there was this big black hole there and I was like well where do I you know I don't this one component that I leaned on which was the research component for other athletes it just wasn't there and I had to make extrapolations from the triathlon literature the cycling literature and even stuff from the military to help inform practice so to see it start to come around to the point where it is now where there are some position stands there's more there's an overall bigger body of literature to work with to for for me has been um for for me has been really interesting to see because I I've seen it from where it literally has started from very very little so I'm very appreciative to researchers like yourself that have worked so hard to bring these things to light I'm just very passionate about about the area and I know that there's a dearth of literature particularly review papers and position stands that kind of can summarize this stuff and help with the translation to mainstream um you know it's it's difficult because it's you can't really replicate the conditions of ultra marathon or ultra endurance exercise in the lab and most of the good mechanistic research is done in the lab environment because that's where all the expensive kit is and field studies are just not quite the same because by definition you're out you know you're outside of the lab you can't transport your expensive kit and ultra marathon runners tend to be uh well they're less happy to give

up their time and risk damaging their race performance to come and give blood samples or or go and do maximal testing before their race which is understandable but uh researchers are now making strides in that area taking time and um a little bit of monetary investment as well to actually get some kit out in the field and you know um the literature is now starting to trickle out okay so here's what we're gonna do super excited I'm really I'm really psyched for this conversation we're gonna take this paper that you wrote and we're gonna use it as a conversation outline and what we're gonna try to do is dissect the paper kind of like piece by piece and not only discuss what you illuminated through the paper itself but also kind of take away both you and my practical takeaway for athletes on each one of these pieces because you're a runner you're an ultra runner yourself and as you now have the scope of when you come up with these papers there's a lot that you that you can that you have to leave out but just because you leave it out doesn't mean that you can't make a reasonable extension of the research or a reasonable interpretation of the research in order to kind of better inform athletes on a day-to-day basis so I want to go through each piece and take away the research findings and then also what those mean practically for any athlete inclusive of ourselves and we're going to roughly divide this conversation

into the two pieces that the paper is divided up up into and that's nutrition to support ultra marathon training and take that first off and then nutrition to support ultra marathon racing as a second part cool all right sounds good let's let's go for the jugular let's dive right in what so what are the key takeaways for ultra marathon athletes to support their day-to-day training habits well the it's no coincidence that the first thing we talk about in the paper is meeting calorific demands because far and away the the biggest challenge that ultra marathon runners will come up against in training is getting enough calories in and you know there's broad variability in terms of the weekly weekly mileage for an individual because obviously it depends what race they're training for it depends what standard they're they're um they're training at but getting enough calories is is far and away the hardest thing to do so that's the first thing that we that we spoke about in the paper and then we you know after that we we go on and talk about monitoring hydration status and we go into kind of the minutia of looking at carbohydrate recommendations and protein but but calories first and foremost is the main one and how this whole this whole concept of calories in calories out it has been repeated ad nauseum amongst

researchers and athletes and even coaches you need to you need to fuel for the work required is a common theme that uh that we use you need to eat enough to match your caloric demands and things like that but in practice that's an extremely hard thing to act for an athlete to actually accomplish and it's hard for it's it's it's incredibly difficult for three variables the first two of which have nothing to do with ultra marathon running tracking calories in number one and tracking calories out for anybody even a normal athlete is horrifically inaccurate anytime you're trying to use one of the calorie you know tracking apps or the food locking apps or things like that like the registered dietitians out in the field they just pull their hair out trying to make sense of those just because of like it okay it's that apple 100 calories or 120 calories that doesn't seem like a lot but it's 20 and then you multiply that by every single food item and then you get this just i describe it as a horrific level of inaccuracy because it really is those are the first two things but the third thing that makes this equation incredibly complicated for uh ultra marathon athletes is the fact that their caloric needs the calorie inside of the equation fluctuate so dramatically based on the volume so they could have a rest day and need 2,000 calories 2,200 calories or something like that or they could have a really big

long run and need four or five six thousand calories three times that in one single day and so for from an athlete's perspective trying to create that caloric match each and every day becomes something rather problematic so like what are the what are like the practical implementations of actually meeting this top line calorie level can we can we kind of take away from this for athletes yeah and you've kind of alluded to it already is is this need for periodizing our nutrition programs because we spend so much time periodizing our training right we have a particular race that we're training for or a couple of races throughout the season and we might follow a micro or a macro cycle or ideally both if you're an olympic athlete you have a you have a four-year macro cycle and we spend so much time planning our training regimen to make sure we peak for the right time we need to be doing the same with our nutritional intake as well so if if you have a a large increase in weekly training mileage and again you know your weekly training mileage should go up and up and up and then every five or six week we should be having a kind of an easier week ideally a lot of people don't do it but you don't it's training doesn't get you fitter it's recovering from training that gets you fitter and this is something that a lot of people forget so we've got to periodize our nutrition congruent with our training so if you're having a rest day sure you're going to need fewer calories if you're having if you're training twice in a day which a lot of athletes do particularly elite elite level athletes that we're training at least twice a

day then you need a higher calorie intake and then when you dig a little bit deeper down into that then you've got to periodize your macronutrient intake so i'm sure we'll get into it shortly but the importance of manipulating your carbohydrate intake congruent with your training needs is going to be a really important part of getting the endurance adaptations that you need from training so if you're having a an easier day or perhaps your mileage is lower or the intensity of your training sessions it's going to be all slow and steady you're probably not going to need quite as much carbohydrate as if you're doing intervals or fartlek or something higher intensity you're going to be burning through carbohydrate at a faster rate yeah you're right we'll get into the specific carbohydrate protein and fat demands and how those can be periodized but let's stay on the high level calories for just one more second because i really think that sometimes this sometimes the macronutrient periodization okay i'm going to switch from 65 carbohydrate to 60 carbohydrate like a lot of that new nuance kind of it it's just it's too granular for a lot of athletes to practically uh implement the the one of the first things that i always try to get athletes focused on is try to educate them on how many calories they actually how many calories do they actually need from the exercise that they're that they're doing

and there are all these activity apps out there this is a failure of audio i'm showing nick my garmin watch right now that will give us and there's one on the other end of the on the other end of the line uh there are all these activity apps and wearable devices that will try to estimate your caloric range and as we now know now that we've kind of looked back on these calculations they're once again wildly inaccurate and i think that leads athletes to kind of a false sense of security i i i take athletes through a really simple way of determining this that i wanted to kind of get your get your take on we know that the caloric expenditure in running in almost all circumstances can kind of be can can kind of be boiled down to the distance that the athlete runs and how much they weigh and in a flat level condition and we use this we use this kind of universal equation that for every kilometer you run the caloric expenditure for that kilometer can be can be expressed in terms of the kilo the kilograms that you weigh so if you're 70 kilogram individual and you run which is a normal size male most of the time 70 kilogram individual you run one kilometer that one kilometer on flat level terrain that one kilometer is going to take rough like roughly 70 kcals roughly or 70 calories you run 10k 70 700 calories and so the

exercise i take my athletes through since we know their body weight i just have them go and do a normal 10k run at normal endurance pace and we see and we work the math out to see what their caloric expenditure is per unit time based on that 10k so they weigh 60 kilograms they run 10k that's going to take them you know 600 calories worth of energy and let's just say just to make the math easy for me that that 10k took an hour we now know that when they go out and do a normal endurance run that they're going to be burning about 600 calories an hour in that in that particular circumstance once you add in the variability of hills uphill downhill interval training and things like that i think when you i this is a this is a just from observational data that i have when you look at it on the course of days and weeks and months it really doesn't change that much irrespective of the terrain that you're running on or when you're incorporating intervals yeah maybe it's like 1.05 kilocalories per kilogram or maybe it's like 0.95 but once you average it all out it it gets you in the ballpark and so i use that the utility that i use that with is it sets a baseline for you go out on a two-hour run doesn't matter hills flats whatever and you're going to be roughly burning in that last example that i mentioned 1200 calories and so now

we need to look at 1200 calories of food in addition to whatever you need whatever you're eating for the day that's kind of how i've boiled it out but i don't know if there's a better or more reasonable way to look at this total calorie equation for an athlete yeah so there are very sophisticated ways that we can look at this which i'm i'm sure you and your listeners will be at least familiar with but but it depends if you have access to the kit right so if you if you have access to a physiology lab or if you work in one or if you if you know if you if you've got a buddy that works in an exercise physiology lab then you know ask them to to do you a favor and get and take you into the lab because we can measure calorie expenditure so we can measure resting metabolic rate very accurately and we can see how many calories you're you're burning when you're supile and you're sitting upright we can measure how many calories you're burning at different running speeds obviously it depends it's going to depend on all sorts of things some of which you mentioned whether you're male or female your your body mass your body fat percentage what running speed or velocity you're you're working at but we can quantify all of these things very very closely you just need a device to measure gas exchange and you can look at what we call rer respiratory exchange ratio and we can get some a pretty accurate understanding of how many calories you're burning in any given instance but most people don't have access to that kit which is which is fine so we have to make some assumptions and the the the strategy that

you just talked through is is more than good enough you know i i'm i'm a big fan of heart rate monitors because even though they do make a lot of assumptions and you know that they're not going to be super accurate they do exactly the same thing they get you in a ballpark so most heart rate monitors get you to enter what your stature is what your mass is they can record if you have something that's sophisticated enough it can record your running speed so based on all these different assumptions it can give you an estimation of how many calories you're burning in a given run and some athletes don't like wearing heart rate monitors but but i think you know for me personally data is knowledge so the more information you have the better there's there's an argument you know we could talk about that that's a different podcast perhaps but but um i like having the data so if you can just get in the right ballpark then you can use that to inform your nutritional strategies yeah and i think the big the the thing to emphasize there is ballpark you're never going to get it exactly precise when you're out in the field because of all the other confounding factors you can't measure it there there are a lot of other things that that'll impact caloric expenditure but the the the drive home message for athletes and you really you you you explain this to to to a really good extent in table two in the paper which showed male and female athletes at different body weights that are running at different speeds and how different their caloric requirements were for an hour of uh for an hour of

activity and i think to my earlier point because ultra marathon training inevitably involves these really high caloric expenditure days two three hours out on the run that can subsequently be followed by low caloric expenditure days where it's you know an hour 30 minute recovery run or something like that because those calorie requirements are so different i think driving home the point that you are going to have those two extremes first to an athlete that might vary as much as 4 000 calories one day 2 000 calories the next right 50 reduction right there driving home those things to hit these caloric requirements first is the big point and then trying to figure out what each individual run means from a caloric standpoint is the second piece and whether you use a simple equation like i use and you just find out your caloric rate or you're using a heart rate monitor that can help you kind of more fine tune it yeah and the table to which you're referring in in the paper it's table two and for anyone who hasn't got the paper in front of them it's it's basically we've separated it into two categories male and female the females have two kind of extremes quote-unquote of body mass that you might typically see in an ultra marathon 50 to 70 kilos males it might be 65 to 85 and then we've got three different running velocities and estimated daily caloric requirements and that that table took a long time to pull together because the the title of the table is estimated daily caloric requirements and we based the table

on a whole bunch of different data it's almost like we did a mini review and looked at all of the data on estimated calorie expenditure in endurance runners and then we pulled all of that together and then came up with our own kind of macro estimation based on their pre-existing literature so it's all estimation and you know one of the key take-home messages i'm sure when we get to the end of this discussion will be everyone is different so it's about trying to figure out what your individual needs are what your metabolic needs are and how you can go your your go as far as you can to estimating what they are but you know just to just you know one other thing that's important to highlight is we take a step back and kind of zoom out on all of this kind of stuff you can look at individual calorie requirements but ultimately we can you can look at the symptoms of whether of what happens when you are meeting or not meeting your caloric requirements so if you're monitoring in the long term what's happening to your body mass are you having fluctuations in in your weight is your weight going up or down if you're losing weight then that would suggest that you're probably not meeting your caloric requirements that may be something that is targeted or it may be inadvertent you can think about what your energy levels are you able to train at a high intensity are you more or less susceptible to picking up infections and you know colds and flus that would suggest that you're you're immunocompromised and all of these things will you know a bit of detective work is all that's needed maybe your nutrition is not sufficient for your

needs if any of these things it's interesting that you mentioned that nick so you don't know this but i'll enlighten you right now you're the third person this week the third person from the uk this week in fact that i've had on this podcast and the the other two uh the other two you'll be familiar with is glenn davison and craig sale so we're talking about immune function and bone health you're the third person this week that said the key to whatever we're talking about and in their and in their uh cases it's immune function and bone health and by the time this podcast is released those two previous podcasts will will be released so that listeners can check those out as well the key to whatever we're talking about the first key the big rock the big thing to fit to to fixate on is total energy availability and it rings true in when we talk about ultra marathon running from a performance perspective from a global piece is you got to get the calories right first before we focus on the macro nutrient composition or any other subset of nutrition that we're talking about yeah no i couldn't agree more that that's that's if you're not getting your calories right then nothing everything else falls by the wayside anyway so this is this is your first protocol for sure particularly for an ultra runner when your calorie expenditure is going to be so high so high i know that that's it's it's confounding and i don't it's it's hard to come up with another sport example where that high low discrepancy and total uh total energy needs actually exists from a

day-to-day training perspective it's really really hard to find that you might find that in some like olympic level like decathletes who are just training like you know four hours a day or something like that because they've got to do all the events but ultra marathon is really really unique in that um uh in that aspect so first thing is get your calories right sure now let's move on to the macronutrient distribution carbohydrates protein and fat what does the consensus of the literature say about how we can manipulate those variables to support ultra marathon training this is something that that we labored over when writing the paper not because we didn't know what the recommendation should be but i was more concerned with the narrative with the message that we were conveying because the literature overwhelmingly supports a relatively high carbohydrate diet okay that there is that we can go back and forth on this and some people will suggest low carbohydrate diets and ketogenic diets and so forth but if you look at the bulk of the literature for individuals who are training for ultra marathon or any other endurance sport who have a relatively high weekly mileage you need at least 60 percent of your energy intake to come from carbohydrates now how you manipulate that and how you periodize that congruent with your training is the really tricky part because even though carbohydrate is going to be a really important part of your nutritional intake there are a couple of things to consider well firstly a lot of

people will train on very low carbohydrate diets and will swear by them the reality is that the athletes who can be successful following a rate a very low carbohydrate diet are actually in the minority most people will need a higher carbohydrate intake the other thing is that there is a lot of really good literature showing that if you i hesitate to use the word restrict but i'll use it for now and i'll i'll put a caveat in shortly if you restrict your carbohydrate intake then you can promote the endurance adaptation because you trigger certain cell signaling pathways like amp kinase which are really important for augmenting the endurance response but if you train in a chronically glycogen depleted state then there's again plenty of good literature on this mike gleason has published a bunch of stuff on in immune dysfunction for example if you train for prolonged periods without taking calories or if you're chronically glycogen depleted then increases your susceptibility for getting colds and flus it can compromise your ability to recover it's going to impact on your ability to train at a high intensity so there's this really tricky balance between moderating your carbohydrates enough to augment your endurance response but getting enough carbohydrate to make sure that you're not getting perpetually injured and picking up infections that are going to keep you away from training and that's a really tricky thing that's a really hard thing to do because you've got to know your body really well

and what about so what about what i have always mentioned about those low carbohydrate types of strategies is yes we can always get the manipulation in the lab you restrict carbohydrates or you reduce the amount of carbohydrates that an athlete is taking in to whatever extent or however you're going to restrict and or manipulate them and your body's going to compensate i mean your body's smart it's going to figure out a way to you know create cell signaling and create structures in order to accommodate for that reduced macronutrient availability absolutely but there are compromises to that just like anything else just like there are compromises whenever you are in a higher carbohydrate state and sometimes those compromises aren't in fact worth the outcome of being a better fat burner having all of your fat burning capabilities up regulated but you mentioned that so so before we dive into the weeds too too quickly here let's still let's still kind of like set the table on this macronutrient uh on the on the macronutrient side of things so what the literature recommends over and you said overwhelmingly is that ultra marathon athletes would be best served if roughly 60 percent of their calories are derived from carbohydrates and how you get to that 60 percent can actually vary i mean that's 60 percent i i at least when i'm reading it i'm as i'm interpreting it i'm interpreting it as an overall number for some reason you

could calculate the total amount of calories over a nine month training period and break them down be a macronutrient 60 percent of them would be carbohydrates but there is some allowance there to vary it within certain periods or even within certain days such that you want to take advantage of the situation that's going on am i interpreting that correctly yeah absolutely so that the idea is that if if you can manipulate your nutritional strategy or your carbohydrate intake so that you are doing the majority of your slow steady sessions what you know you can call them whatever you like steady sessions endurance sessions fat burning sessions whatever you want to call them in a relatively i wouldn't say glycogen depleted but not fully repleted state then you're going to augment the response and then if you're going to take in carbohydrate take it in after the run and we talk in the paper you know i i again went to pains to make sure that rather than use the word carbohydrate restriction i prefer the term carbohydrate moderation so that you're carefully moderating your carbs congruent with your training load rather than just restricting carbohydrate outright because you know the danger is that you make a recommendation like that and runners take it to heart particularly if they have this pre-existing belief that low carbohydrate diets are the way to go they'll just cut out carbs altogether and acutely they'll they'll probably be able to manage on that

for maybe a week or a couple of weeks and then they'll then they'll crash and burn you know um so acutely maybe you'll you'll you'll be able to manage it but in the long it's not a sustainable strategy ultra marathoners are are just notorious for taking this advice of if a pinch of something is good a pound of it is better and a kilogram is the best thing you know on the face of the planet and that goes with that that goes with with calories and things having to do with nutrition to to to a big extent and you're absolutely right that when people look at either the title headline or the sexy headline that kind of comes out in the lay literature that says oh well restricting carbohydrate has xyz benefit though a lot of ultra runners and triathletes do this too but we'll we'll stick with ultra runners now a lot of ultra runners will look at that and go oh well if i restrict it by whatever 10 or for one session or whatever it is is good if i do 10 times that it must be 10 times better in which what you're saying and what we're trying to emphasize is is that that dose response goes from positive to negative pretty quickly once you start to induce further and further restriction yeah there's a very fine line that's and i think that's a really key message to get across there's a very fine line between getting enough carbohydrate to sustain your training and not getting enough to recover properly i think ultimately if if you're training fairly seriously and your mileage is high enough it doesn't

matter how much you eat you're going to be relative you're going to be depleted to some extent anyway you know it takes a special kind of someone who can be training for an ultra marathon and put on weight you know i mean i i know a couple of people that have managed it but it's pretty rare you know if your mileage is high enough you're going to lose weight so which that suggests that you are your calorie intake is not sufficient anyway well so let's let's let's break this let's break this carbohydrate proposition down because there's a lot of athletes that are fixated on this and whenever i produce a podcast that has optimized fat metabolism in it or ketogenic diets or high carb low fat or high fat low carb something to do with that those are the ones that are guaranteed to get like the most hits especially in the ultra marathon world because it is it is such a hot topic so i want to stay in these waters a little bit and i think maybe a way that we can uh that we can take this conversation is there's kind of two there's like two ways that you could potentially manipulate training and diet to push this fat oxidation phenotype one way is the low carb high fat approach so overall globally in terms of macronutrient content you're just taking in less carbohydrates and more fat and then therefore as a byproduct of all of that macronutrient intake or that macronutrient distribution all of your fat oxidizing

capabilities are upregulated the other way is to look at specific and this is what we were alluding to earlier really specific um low carbohydrate availability sessions and kind of the two the two flavors of those that have kind of emerged is a fasted session so you're going out doing a normal uh during a doing a normal run in a fasted state so you have low carbohydrate availability to kind of start out with and the second one is is to induce low carbohydrate availability via two back-to-back or two sessions that are in the same day so you go out in the morning you do a session of intervals you intentionally don't kind of top off the glycogen stores uh uh uh as much as you normally would and then you go into another endurance session with slightly reduced uh carbohydrate uh availability i think it's important to separate those those two the the whole macronutrient the low carb high fat strategies versus the workout strategies because they have much different implications so let's take the latter first these two flavors of workouts training in a fasted state and then doing some sort of back-to-back session um how first off i explained a little bit but from the research that you gathered how practically how would athletes practically implement these uh these low carbohydrate availability types of sessions yeah so in practical terms and again they've got to be practiced tentatively until

you've been running long enough so that you know your body but you're going to go and train in a fasted state let's say you know a lot of athletes will anchor their week around a you know one particular session that is that is particularly long so let's say it's a sunday morning run and you get up at if you're enthusiastic you get up at 7 a.m and you get out the door and you're going to go and run for you know if you're starting off you might only go and run for an hour but if you're more if you're more advanced you might go and run for two three four hours and and cover anywhere between 15 20 25 miles whatever it is that you're doing the idea would be to get up on a on a in a fasted state and the research shows that you can become anywhere between 50 and 80 percent glycogen depleted following your overnight fast and you get up and you go and run without taking breakfast without taking anything that might constitute that without taking any calories so you're not putting milk or sugar in your tea or your coffee if you want to have you know black coffee for the caffeine then that's that's slightly different that again that's maybe that's another conversation but the idea is you go but you get up and go so again you get up and you get up and you go yeah ideally yeah and so and and this is important because if you're if you're moderately glycogen depleted if you're completely glycogen depleted you're not going to run and you shouldn't be running but if you're moderately depleted then we trigger these ampk cell signaling pathways and in the long term we're augmenting fat oxidation rates

we're increasing our ability to mobilize and oxidize fats where we're encouraging mitochondrial biogenesis all of these really important things that we consider are really crucial for in for the endurance adaptation and the idea is that you should avoid taking in calories for at least an hour or two of your slow steady state run now you don't want to go out and run for three or four hours without taking calories because you're going to come back from your run you're going to be you're going to be even more depleted and that's going to have carryover effects for your next session and that might impact your training for the whole rest of the week unless you're a particularly high level runner and you're you know you're cranking out hundreds of miles a week for most people going out and running for two hours say without taking in calories is more than sufficient then maybe before you become completely depleted you start taking in some carbohydrates you start taking in some calories it goes back to what you were saying earlier but you know if a little bit of something is good then a whole lot more must be better well you know it's good to go out and train on an empty stomach but if you go out and train for four or five hours on an empty stomach you're going to pay for it at some point so that's one strategy the other strategy as you've mentioned is training back-to-back sessions and even though the mechanism is slightly different it still amounts to the same thing you're training your second session in a moderately glycogen depleted state so you're augmenting the endurance adaptation that way and the key piece with both of these is that the run the training activity that you're doing and the glycogen depleted state and i'm being very deliberate like with the with with

my wording right now because it's glycogen depleted not not completely depleted partially depleted the run that you're doing in that depleted state is not that hard it's a moderate to low intensity session what we would call an endurance run for 60 or 90 minutes it's not intervals it's not a four-hour run it's something that's completely reasonable and i i am not i am not the biggest i'll just state it right now i am not the biggest advocate for a lot of these low carbohydrate types of strategies particularly because the cost benefit starts to fall out of balance but when you're doing it in a really smart way and in this case you're taking your lower priority sessions or your lower intensity sessions or the sessions that don't cost as much right the cost side of the equation when you're trying to manipulate these variables through uh uh through those types of activities and the cost isn't that high then i kind of look at it and go okay that's not that's not the worst thing in the world absent of anything else you have a perfectly healthy athlete they're not susceptible to injury they're not susceptible to any other illness you're not markedly increasing their training load and things like that that's where i would fall towards these types of strategies because you're reducing the risk and all of those other all of those other areas that's where i take it from a practical perspective is make sure that the sessions that you're doing with lower carbohydrate availability are the easier ones the more

moderate ones and make sure that there are no other confounding factors like injury and or illness yeah i reinforce that 100 and it's important to think about the intensity of your session you shouldn't be doing these sessions you know not all of your sessions should be strategized this way you have to think about you go and do a slow steady session you're working well below your lactate threshold you know this is a low intensity run this is kind of your ultra marathon pace you know this is very very slow it's very easy you're going to be burning a lot more fat than you would normally do it this is not even marathon pace anytime you you shift your your running speed or your work rate above your lactate threshold you start to burn through a lot more carbohydrate you try going and doing an interval session or any kind of speed work when you're even moderately glycogen depleted you will feel it and your work rate will suffer and you'll feel like crap but these are absolutely as you said these are slow sessions right easy very steady should be able to have a conversation with the person next to you or you know talk to yourself if you have to if you're if you're breathing hard then you're the intensity is too high it's a very it's a slow steady session those the only sessions that work when you're in this kind of glycogen moderately glycogen depleted state yep yep totally reasonable strategy i have no issue with that i think that sometimes the amount of benefit that the athlete can actually extract from that another reason that i i kind of stumble that i stumble over giving athletes this particular

prescription is sometimes the upside even when you mitigate the risk on the downside sometimes the upside it's like well they're just going to get that upside by training anyway so why would why why would i go and artificially manipulate these variables i think that that's we've gotten in the weeds for this too much but i think suffice it to say that some low carbohydrate availability training in a state where it's very low risk could be a reasonable strategy there are all the caveats that i can throw into one single into one single statement of totally true let's move on to like the 800 pound gorilla in the ultra marathon nutrition world and this is low fat high carbohydrate and ketogenic diets i hate to lump them into the same category but we kind of have to just from like a time perspective and i also think that from a practical perspective a lot of the lessons that are learned one of the reasons this is an 800 pound gorilla in the room is is something that you just mentioned is that there is a good amount of anecdotal evidence of case studies that we can look at for ultra marathon runners that have been very successful even at the elite level utilizing a very low carbohydrate approach a high fat approach and or a ketogenic approach and some combination of those kind of throughout their training now they're few and far between i agree with you there that if

we look at the entire context of elite performance the ones that have used ketogenic and low carbohydrate types of strategies are are few and far between but they're out there and they get a lot of they get a lot of attention and it's at least worth noting that's one of the that's one of the things that always confounds the literature when you're trying to stylize it is that you're always going to find these anomalous you know anomalous athletes and anomalous variables that you can't really put into context so why don't you kind of go through and and you mentioned that you came to the consensus that the overwhelming amount of literature supported a higher carbohydrate diet which is around 60 percent carbs but i'm sure this was some point of it if not contention at least consternation amongst the group of uh the group of scientists that you had looking at it so why don't you start to start to paint that picture in terms of what those recommendations started to look like and it is i mean it's quite a guerrilla it's it's such a divisive issue and uh you know people tend to sit very very distinctly on one side of the fence or the other and it's it's almost a position that is characterized by all the classic symptoms of ideology you know you you ascribe to one one side or the other um so you know i'm i'm gonna probably sit on end up sitting on the fence in terms of you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna put my flag in the ground one way or another other than to just say

well this is what this is what the literature says and that there is there is emerging data on the use of ketogenic diets in in endurance exercise and what we summarized in the paper was and again we spent a lot of time thinking about this and there are 25 authors on the paper everybody agrees by consensus statement on this that there's some interesting preliminary data the good studies that show that you can that you can augment fatty acid oxidation rates mostly come from rodent studies so in rats and mice there are a couple of studies showing that the ketogenic diet can enhance fat oxidation rates in runners but there is nothing or very little specific to ultramarathon and for a position stand there is simply not enough research at the moment to be advocating a ketogenic diet for an ultramarathon runner problem that we have and this is a comment on the contemporary culture as a whole is that sensationalist headlines what sensationalist news get grabs the headlines you know good good science sneaks under the radar because it's not exciting it's not sexy it's not interesting the the headline grabbing news are the studies that stick out you know it's it's it's it's the um it's it's the vegan athlete or it's the the keto athlete who you know goes in and puts on an impressive performance in the race despite the fact that the the vegan endurance runners and

keto athletes are actually in the minority that that's not to say that that you can't be an excellent athlete and be vegan or or be a keto athlete or um or whatever because obviously there are there are lots of examples of this and um again that that's that that's clear for everyone to see but when we look at the literature there is simply not enough data available to advocate ketogenic diets for ultra endurance sport it's as simple as that yeah and and i think the the one of the key things that you mentioned there is that this is a position stand that has to incorporate all of the available literature not just one or two or three pieces that can advocate for having a ketogenic diet or having a low uh a low carb diet but the the the fundamental trade-off and this is where we can kind of get into the practical back and forth between you and i because the the research on this is is very new and you mentioned a lot of it is in rodents um uh the the practical trade-off between these two is fundamentally if you're undertaking a low carb high fat diet and or a ketogenic diet you're upgrading you're up regulating all of your body's fat burning capabilities at the expense of its ability to perform high intensity exercise and the high carbohydrate side is almost the inverse of that now we can get into some nuance on how does a low carb diet impact bone health or

immunity and these are the some of the things i was talking about with some of my earlier guests that uh that have come down but from a performance standpoint this yin yang of fat oxidation versus intensity is very clear and to to my knowledge yet there's no way that you can get around it because it's all based in on like these old stoichiometric equations that we've used to to to determine energy expenditure i mean what so what is your what is your take on what that in intensity versus fat oxidation compromise how relevant is it to an endurance athlete and how much could they be impairing their performances with higher fat like higher fat types of diets or taking on a ketogenic diet or something like that like is it that big is that trade-off that big of a problem i think is kind of what the question that i'm trying to get at i think ultimately the way to answer that is that everybody is different and we know that there are now uh you know there are genetic studies now where where we're finding that some people oxidize carbohydrates very very effectively some people are very very good at burning fats we all know somebody that that eats you know whatever they like and they they're always eating dessert and they drink a lot and they eat junk food and they and they're still as skinny as a rake you know they never put on any weight because and and and by contrast everybody knows somebody who has always been heavy and will always be heavy because people have different metabolisms people have different frames and and anthropometry and

that's always going to be the case so everybody is different and some people will respond differently to different nutritional regimens so it is a little bit trial and error finding out what works for you so i'm not going to i'm not going to turn around to somebody who's been very very successful following a ketogenic diet and tell them that that their strategy isn't working because they're not going to listen to me so for some people it probably will work right but and the other thing is that to kind of bring it back to your question is that for the most part when you're training for ultra endurance sport most of your sessions are going to be low intensity long duration anyway it's about racking up the miles you don't and again tell me if you disagree with this you're the coach but you don't need to be doing a lot of high intensity training you know maybe a little bit of thrower work if you're going to be running marathons simultaneously with octamarathon you might you might want to do a little bit more tempo paced stuff but but for the most part you need to be increasing your mileage you're going to do a lot of slow steady running and so it might be more feasible to get away with a diet that is relatively lower in carbohydrate uh and you know there are there are some studies by by volet for example who has found that you can get similar increases in in fat mobilization and oxidation rates following a ketogenic diet quote unquote ketogenic that actually has up to 80 grams of carbohydrate per day which isn't classically ketogenic um but that might be just

about enough to offset the decrements that you might see with chronic glycogen depletion 80 grams a day is still not very much but but no it is it's still very low but it's not nothing that's hardly still might be sufficient but particularly if you're training at a very low intensity uh for long periods of time but ultimately it comes back to listen to your body i know for me when i'm doing very high mileage training if i'm if i'm training for a particularly long race i know that i need a certain amount of carbohydrates i know how i how i feel when i become chronically glycogen depleted i can't train at all even if i'm doing slow steady running if i'm glycogen depleted so i know how my body responds and i know how i run best but uh there's a certain degree of experience that comes with that yeah i agree with that individual response side of things and i think out of this out of the whole low carb high fag ketogenic dialogue the the one that the piece of it that really irritates me the most is that it works for me it will work for you that's that's where and i would say that about any strategy to be quite frank with you it worked for me it worked for you particularly in nutrition because we know that there's such a that's my that's my dog shaking her head in the background by the way she makes an appearance on this podcast every now and again sasha um but we we do know that in in particular respects to nutrition there is a high degree of individual variability um now i don't

i don't use that as a license to say do whatever you want to do because we still have to stay within the confines of human physiology on a lot of this stuff but when i hear when i hear people and you mentioned the entrenchment or the dogmatic nature uh of these camps that's the one that irritates me the most is when we go back and forth and say well this worked for me so it's going to work for everybody and and to give credit where credit's due i think a lot of the dialogue that a lot of that particular dialogue is starting to get a little bit muted because we're starting to realize that yeah you know there are people that can be very successful on a low carb or a ketogenic diet but we're also starting to realize that just as your story is a great example of there are people that are just not successful that have tried that have tried it because they are either curious or they heard so and so did it and they're like man this is this is kind of not for me so i think the take-home message is is in this and when i have athletes that are curious about that about things like this what i have them do is do it in increments which is okay you're if you normally are taking in 60 grams of carbohydrate let's reduce it to 50 and see how you feel okay let's reduce it to 40 and see how you feel and normally there's some sort of like you get that you get that feedback loop of i'm better here i'm worse there and then you can kind of use that to inform decisions versus completely upsetting the apple cart and saying okay we're going to kind of radically change this the only situations that i do

that in are the people that are like completely off the wagon in the first place that have you know horrifically bad mcdonald's diets and things like that like they need the total cleansing yeah and and i think that there's there's a strategy in critical thinking called defeasibility and and it rather than throwing evidence and uh and numbers at people who who may already have fixed ideas on a particular subject it's it's always better to to to test the extent to which their ideas are very entrenched with this process called the feasibility so you you ask them what would it take to change your mind so if you have somebody that is a an advocate of a very low carbohydrate diet and sugar is the demon and and uh you know is the is the cause of all of the body's ailments then okay what would it take to change your mind would it take data would it take evidence would it take an expert talking about you know the emergence of some new literature and if their answer is well nothing would change my mind then you know that that's an ideology right then then that's not a position that is based on reason and evidence uh you know and you can do that with pretty much anything any any subject about which somebody has very fixed views and has made up their mind already what would it just see cleave some some room for doubt and that that that word is really important and i'm i'm kind of getting a little bit off topic here but i think it's such an important overarching message that there has to be doubt don't have fixed

ideas on anything always leave room for some doubt and go where the evidence and where the experts are guiding you because if there's if there's no room for doubt then you're following an ideology and nobody can nobody's going to tell you otherwise 100 i'm i'm 100 on board with you so we we've been spending a lot of time naturally because this is an endurance audience like hyper focused on carbohydrates and fats but there's another macronutrient that's also in the room that we also need to discuss in terms of performance and that's protein which is incredibly important for uh for endurance sports and it's also one that that is just quite frankly studied more so what what could what do we know about protein for the ultra marathon athlete and how they should be how they should be viewing that particular macronutrient protein is a much easier one because as you alluded to the there's a lot more literature in this area and it's it's pretty well studied so scientists and academics and nutritionists and dietitians all agree on the importance of protein that there are there are still arguments regarding some of the nuances of protein intake but the broad overarching messages are pretty consistent so we know that protein protein doesn't have a a really important role in in energy metabolism per se so if you're sufficiently energy restricted then your body will start breaking down structural and functional proteins to maintain blood glucose

concentration that's more related to racing but on a day-to-day basis protein doesn't have a really important role in energy metabolism it's more about growth and maintenance of muscle tissue and in in the actual paper it was a little bit tricky because there there are no specific protein guidelines for ultra endurance athletes or for ultramarathon runners we can extrapolate what we already know with a reasonable degree of confidence but it hasn't been really closely studied in ultramarathon runners what we do know is that if you are participating in very high volume training or high intensity training then your protein demands increase because you're you're in a catabolic state more frequently and we normally break this down into into grams per kilo so the the normal recommendations would be to consume about a one gram of protein per kilogram of body mass uh so you guys working pounds don't you so 2.2 pounds in a kilo you can you can do the math and if you're exercising very long sessions or if you're exercising very high intensity or if you're doing strength and resistance type work your protein demands go up and they might go up as high as two grams per kilo per day and if you have very high mileage training where your calorie expenditure is going through the roof then it might be as high as high as three grams per kilo per day because you need to consume more overall calories just to in order to break even

in terms of the the spacing out of that protein so let's say you've got somebody um who's a let's say a 50 kilogram female again i know you guys work in pounds but if you if you're trying to optimize protein intake then you're going to try and get about two grams per kilo per day so that's an easy one looking at about 100 grams of protein if you've got a particularly heavy runner then it gets a little bit more difficult because you have somebody that's at the other extreme who weighs 100 kilos then you're looking at 200 grams of protein per day at the upper limit which is much which is much harder to get but the research is pretty clear that you optimize fractional synthetic rate or you or let's let's call this muscle protein synthesis by consuming protein in in roughly 20 to 30 gram doses or boluses and you want to try and space them evenly throughout the day every three to four hours and that's that's kind of as complicated as it gets you know we can talk about some of the details in terms of the quality of the proteins and and specific food sources but we know roughly how much exercising individuals need per day we know how much they need per meal and assuming that you are getting somewhere between 20 30 40 grams depending on your body mass every three to four hours throughout the day then there's a good chance you're going to be meeting your protein requirements so we're saving

the simplest for last is what you're trying to say in this whole macronutrient and and i and i agree with you and i think a lot of people can resonate with the math of just finding out their protein requirements per unit of body weight versus trying to figure out figure out their calorie or try to figure out their carbohydrate or their fat requirements as a percentage of the whole like for whatever reason they can take their weight and say okay i weigh 70 kilograms or 50 kilograms or 150 pounds or whatever and they can apply that simple math and it's just it's just kind of easier for them to wrap their heads around um are there are there any nuances in men versus women with regards to protein intake so ultimately the overarching message is to go with body mass uh because there's that there are there are some studies now emerging looking at sex differences in in protein intake and protein metabolism but the key thing as i've already mentioned is that when you're when you're going out and you're and you're training and when you're working out your the energy metabolism or resynthesizing atp adenosine triphosphate comes from burning carbohydrates and fats so we're breaking down carbohydrates and fats for energy metabolism under normal circumstances protein doesn't have a significant role to play in energy metabolism unless you are substantially depleted in the other macronutrients so as long as we're looking at protein intake relative to body mass that's probably your best guide and again you want to try

and get high quality protein sources so when when you say protein to an athlete most of them will probably think of meat and fish you know particularly red meat and all of protein that's kind of the quintessential protein or eggs you know whereas these are they these tend to be the better sources of protein in terms of the amino acid profile and the bioavailability there are plenty of plant sources of protein as well which which can which are perfectly good to satisfy your needs so if you are a vegetarian or you're a vegan it's absolutely possible to meet your protein demands through a completely plant-based diet but the caveat is it's just a little bit harder and it requires a little bit more thought and a little bit more planning there's a lot of dialogue uh around protein with ultramarathon athletes that is that that states that ultramarathoners should be taking in more more protein simply because of the amount of muscular damage that they're incurring and we can look at you know the ultramarathon races where they've tried to study this and we can look at some of the studies that they've done uh for day-to-day ultramarathon athletes that that indicate that there is a high degree of muscle turnover muscle breakdown uh associated with training for the sport is that something that you would look at and and and and that is indicative of a runner needed that needs to take in a like something towards the higher end of one of those ranges that you just mentioned

yeah so there are two things that will mediate the extent to which your your you will exhibit muscle damage so it's the velocity of shortening of the muscles so this is high intensity stuff and obviously the duration of exercise as well so anytime you're getting lengthening and shortening of a muscle over a very very long period of time typically unless you're very very new to training for ultramarathon the only times that you're going to get really substantial muscle damage is if you are going out and doing a race so you're so you're training or you're racing over a distance that you wouldn't necessarily that that is more than than what you would uh uh undertake in training or if you are running on particularly hilly or mountainous terrain so we know from the literature that it's it's actually the downhill running that does more damage rather than uphills and so if you're training on the trails or in the mountains and you're doing a lot of repeated downhill running it's the eccentric load on the muscle that it does more damage it introduces more micro tears into the muscle so if you're doing a lot of this type of training then your protein demands might go up if you're doing a lot of high intensity stuff or if you're racing frequently then your protein demands are going to be higher but if you're just going out and you're running on relatively flat terrain with a relatively high mileage there's there's i can't see a scenario where your protein demands would be higher than for example a a strength athlete or somebody who's participating in a power-based sport what about branch chain amino acids i mean

that's been a focal that's been a focal point for a lot of athletes not just endurance athletes for for for years your paper specifically touched on amino our branch chain amino acids for just a little bit what do we know about that so from my perspective it's something that that could play a key role in racing which which we'll probably get on to shortly during during day-to-day training i can't see a good reason for having to supplement with bcaa's unless your diet is insufficient if you're getting enough protein in your diet and you're getting good sources of protein as well you know particularly if they've got a a comprehensive list of amino acids in the protein that you're taking in then there's there shouldn't be a need to be supplementing with any type of protein particularly bcaa's so it again it comes down to individual needs it comes down to looking at your training requirements your nutritional demands if you find that you're really struggling to meet your protein demands you know we spoke about this this example earlier perhaps you have an athlete who's particularly large and their protein demands are going to be substantially higher than anybody else it might be difficult to physically eat 200 grams of protein a day you know that's quite a lot of there's quite a lot of chicken and you know there's a lot of eggs and if you're a vegan then good luck to you getting 200 grams of protein from plant-based foods and in which case they could you could put an argument forward for supplementing and bcaa's would be a valid means of

doing so but under normal circumstances if your diet is good shouldn't really be necessary during racing slightly different story all right let's make sure we come back to that during racing because i think that's a that's a really interesting aspect so the protein summary is 1.6 to 2.1 gram per kilogram per day it's a body weight equation that we're looking at we're looking at the size of the athlete and the protein requirements need to fit that size of an athlete and then maybe maybe in certain circumstances particularly really high training loads you could bump that up to two and a half grams per kilogram per day exactly yeah and i think the other thing just to mention is there is a lot of obsession about the timing of of protein intake do you need to consume protein immediately before training during training or after you know it's common to see people in the gym you know drinking their protein during the session as if that provides some kind of you know magical augmentation of of muscular strength the reality is and that again this has been widely studied some really nice review papers on this now assuming you're meeting your protein demands and your protein is drip drip fed throughout the day every three to four hours or so then if you do the basic math you're never going to be more than one and a half hours from a protein feed so unless you're going to be in the gym you know for four or five hours at a time which most people are not then there shouldn't be any requirement to consume protein immediately before during or after just make sure you get your protein

periodically every three to four hours throughout the day and that should be sufficient yeah and i think i'm really glad that you mentioned that i think the thing that confounds that just like everything with ultra marathon running is sometimes the sessions are long enough to where if you're only taking in carbohydrate for a four hour run or a five hour run you kind of run afoul of that drip feeding method so then in those circumstances you just need to be mindful of when that next protein feeding should occur and it's going to be pretty close to the back half or at the very end of that that particular run great yeah okay last piece of day-to-day nutrition this is going to be hydration and in kind of the effort of time i'm going to try to stylize this a little bit you need to take in more fluid than you actually lose because a lot of athletes will go in and we do we do this athlete from a i think where we run afoul of this is one of the common uh one of the common tools that we use that we're going to get into on the racing side of it is a uh is a sweat test so we have an athlete that goes out in a particular condition they run for an hour they weigh themselves before and afterwards and they figure out their sweat rate per hour and those conditions at that intensity and we use that as a tool in in nutrition planning but what gets um erroneously extrapolated from that exercise is i therefore then need to replace that amount of fluid so i lost one kilogram of fluid during this

particular exercise i need to replace it with one kilogram of fluid on the back end of it but in fact that's not the case it's actually more and a lot more right yeah exactly because what people often forget is think about the reason why the humans urinate in the all mammals urinate in the first place is to rid the body of toxins and metabolic byproducts so even if you lose let's say you lose one kilo in training then okay you need to you need to replace the body mass that you've lost but you're still urine you're still peeing out the metabolic byproducts and toxins from the body so you're still losing more fluid your body doesn't doesn't stop that process just because you dehydrate yes it is mitigated to some extent but that's why the recommendations now are to consume approximately 150 of the body mass that you've lost and i you know i love the strategy of pre-deposed weighing it's so simple it's effective everybody can do it just wear yourself nude before and after your session make sure you take into account if you've taken any fluid or if you've been eating as well and you get a pretty good idea of how much fluid you're going to lose in a typical training session it's simple it's easy you can look at the urine color chart look at the color of your pee it's not foolproof but it can just give you an idea as to your hydration status and make sure as you said make sure you consume more fluid than you've lost during the session and ideally try and get some sodium in in your drink as well because the research shows you retain more of that fluid if it contains some sodium

yeah perfect let's let's let's leave the hydration piece there because i think it becomes we're going to spend a lot of time on that on the racing piece of it since it is such a critical importance um is there anything that is that we didn't hit on from a day-to-day nutrition perspective that you think is either worth re-emphasizing or you want to go over really quick before we pivot to the racing side i think we've covered all the bases here you know it's um i think going through the paper sequentially that there's you know the big sections have all been covered so there's there's nothing that comes to mind but if i do think of anything i'll be sure to circle back and mention it yeah no problem at all i always come back to total calories like we just i think as as i think a lot of coaches and athletes and sometimes in the sports science world as well we get drawn into the weeds of well is this you know a vegetable source of protein or an animal source of protein and what does the amino acid profile look like at this and is it a simple carbohydrate versus a complex carbohydrate to like stylize that micronutrient or that macronutrient and you've got to still make sure that you're hitting your total calories first like i always come back to that with my athletes is that if you want to drive improvement if you want to if you if you want to just make the most improvement and make sure you've got all your bases covered hit your total calories first and then once you get close to there we can start to

dive into details after that well yeah and just to extend that i think uh exercises athletes and particularly athletes like ultra runners who tend to be a little bit more obsessive about their training i don't say that lightly that you know there are studies on this high rate of exercise dependence in ultra runners and all sorts but but we we tend to focus on the detail sometimes a little bit too the devil's in the detail i think it's very important but there's no point chasing an extra gram of protein per kilo per day or sorry an extra 0.1 gram of protein per kilo per day or looking at keto or this supplement or bcaa's or anything else unless you've got the basics right and we like treating symptoms we like chasing that one quick fix as humans we're conditioned to to look for the shortcut to performance you know it's that supplement or it's this training program or it's that particular type of diet this this particular fat or barefoot running shoes or compression you know whatever it happens to be and and actually the key thing like you say is bring it back to basics firstly are you recovering right and are you getting enough calories don't worry about anything else for now just focus on the big picture stuff first okay well fortunately the big picture stuff on the racing side is very similar to the big picture stuff on the training side where we first start to look at what are the energy requirements and then we start to look at okay how many how many total calories can we actually take in

and you spend a little bit in the paper talking about energy expenditure and ultramarathon athletes and this is a fascinating area because there are not a lot of field studies or laboratory studies that we can actually lean on we have to lean on as i was alluding to my simple little calculation earlier a lot of just guesstimates based on you know other pieces of research or even biomechanics and things like that so what what can you tell us about the range of energy expenditure that athletes are going to encounter during an ultra i guess the first thing is that a lot of the stuff that we've already spoken about is relevant here because if if you're going to calculate how how many calories a typical adult is burning you know in a one hour run if you take into account their body mass their sex their running velocity and so forth then you can get a pretty good estimation of how many calories they're going to be burning per hour and we spoke about you know potentially using other bits of technology technology to estimate this the literature that we have available we can make a pretty broad brushstroke recommendation that you're going to need somewhere between 150 and 400 calories per hour in order to have a chance of sustaining continued work rate now obviously that's quite a a range and that's to take account of people with very low body mass who might be running particularly slowly and at the other end of the spectrum perhaps heavier people who might be running faster but if you're

running shorter distance you know it was a little bit arbitrary when we were trying to come up with a distance to categorize shorter ultra marathons and longer and we kind of arbitrarily said well i don't know 50 miles but let's say if you're running less than 50 miles it's probably sustainable to be able to take in somewhere between 150 and 300 calories per hour but if you're running longer distances then the consequences of chronic calorie uh depletion or or chronically insufficient calories are going to mount up so so let's say for example you're not meeting your calorie demands and if you're running an ultra marathon there's a pretty good chance you're not going to be taking in as many calories as you're burning i think that's a given yeah you can't but it's the extent to which you can offset that that is going to dictate performance and if you're running a 35 mile race or a 50 mile race then the consequences of chronically low calorie intake are not as great as if you're running a 100 mile race but that's kind of the ballpark range that we're looking at and as you mentioned that's a big range um now we need to move down to it's one thing to know the amount of calories that you're actually burning but it's another it's another thing to know how many calories you should actually take in and this is something that's actually rather rather rather fascinating because in a lot of cases while we

try to have this energy output versus energy input equation try to balance here's one as you've already alluded to where it's just it's almost impossible to balance you're always going to be in some sort of negative output situation given the time and duration it's just how far you can extend it on the energy intake side of things there are all of these different recommendations that float around okay you need 200 to 400 calories 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates this much of this this much of that that before we get into the specific recommendations themselves i think what sets the table for this is what are the limiting factors first and what do we know about what those limiting factors are on the energy intake side of the equation like an athlete wants to take in a gel or two or three or four what's preventing them from taking in or i guess what's limiting them from just taking in 10 gels an hour right what are what are the things that they can that they can look at that limits that energy intake side of the equation well the the primary thing is the gut obviously it's your ability to absorb nutrients through the gut through the intestine get and get get the energy into the blood and the gut can only absorb so many calories it's different from person to person and there is an extent to which you can train the gut but this is this is if there's going to be a traffic jam it's going to be in the gut because there's only so many calories you can absorb but before we even get to

that palatability is so important anybody who's run an ultra marathon over 50 miles so in the shorter distance races if you can finish your run in you know six eight ten hours something you know in that kind of range i'm speaking very broadly here you might get away without suffering gi distress if you're running distances over that i don't think there is a runner alive who has not suffered from gastrointestinal distress to some extent the literature suggests that up to 80 percent 90 percent even of of ultra marathon runners will experience gastrointestinal distress quite frequently and it's usually um it's usually upper gi distress although you can get upper and lower but it's particularly upper so upper so this could be heartburn nausea belching this kind of thing and nausea is the key one because once you start feeling nauseated then inevitably you want to eat less food and if you're not taking in the calories because you feel nauseated then your blood glucose levels start to drop that makes you feel even more nauseated and then it's a downward spiral that's very very difficult to break so palatability of food is really important but ultimately it comes down to how much food you can absorb through the gastrointestinal tract and into the blood and there is a very finite limit for that absorption rate and what is that absorption rate this is what we're this is the crux of everything right

okay so again it's it's going to be different for each individual person uh that it will be different because of the extent to which the gut is trainable and it will be it will depend on the macronutrients that you're consuming if we take carbohydrate as an example you mentioned that some of the recommendations are to consume 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour now the the 90 gram the 60 to 90 gram recommendation for the most part comes from marathon and triathlon literature because there's a lot of research now looking at multiple transportable carbohydrates now the absorption capacity for glucose through the intestine is about 60 grams per hour and without sort of getting into too much detail we know that glucose uses a very specific intestinal transporter sodium dependent glucose transporter one sgl t1 imaginatively titled and it's dependent on on sodium availability which is why a lot of sports drinks contain trisodium citrate for example because it facilitates the movement of glucose through the gut but this sodium transporter has a very finite capacity for transporting glucose and it's thought to be about 60 grams per hour so if you're consuming more than 60 grams of glucose per hour there's a good chance that it's either going to pass straight through and you're going to you're going to pee it out or it's

going to start giving you more likely it's going to start giving you gastrointestinal upset now the premise behind multiple transportable carbohydrates is that they contain an extra sugar fructose and fructose uses a different transporter to to pass through the intestine so it's kind of analogous to opening up a another bridge trying across a river you know you're going to get less of a traffic jam if there's an extra road you're going to get more absorption of carbohydrates so under those circumstances it might be realistic to consume up to 90 grams per hour but most of those recommendations as i've said come from the marathon or triathlon literature when you're exercising for maybe three four hours at a time and that's if you're you know fairly nimble if you're fairly quick you might finish your marathon in three four hours for the majority of people it's going to be slower than that now there's some pretty robust literature from some experts in in the nutritional field who have suggested consuming multiple transportable carbohydrates during ultra endurance exercise particularly ultramarathon and getting 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour but you only need to have run ultramarathon to know that if you try and get 90 grams of carbs per hour particularly from sports drinks which is the only viable way to do it you're going to vomit you are going to throw up particularly if you're exercising for 8 12 hours imagine trying

to consume that volume of sports drink in the 24-hour race it it's not going to happen we think about gels or gels yeah i mean i don't know about you but i know i can tolerate probably four gels an hour for about four hours after that i start feeling pretty sick and that's that's enough you're lucky yeah four hours man i don't know if i could do that for one hour precisely for most people it's maybe one to two gels per hour which which is right might get you through a marathon but but it's grossly insufficient for a race that's going to last longer than that but let's put that into practical terms for for for for the runners who are going to be listening so typical sports drink is about six percent carbohydrate so it's an isotonic drink or maybe six to eight percent so what that means is that for every 100 milliliters of fluid you have six grams of sugar i work in mills you guys work in ounces right so again you'll have to do the conversion but in a typical half liter sports drink you may be looking but depending on the drink somewhere between 30 to 40 grams of carbohydrate so to get 90 grams per hour you're looking at well over a liter of sports drink per hour or if you're thinking about gels okay so maybe there's 20 25 grams of gels uh of carbohydrates in a in a given gel you're looking at four gels per hour again i know i can tolerate that for maybe three four hours but it you know i was in um chamonix i was lucky enough to be

invited to chamonix to do some research at the UTMB last september with the mayor with the mayor clinic and some of the really good the elite athletes we know they finish in 24 hours but but very good runners will take 35 40 hours to complete that race it's a very tough race one of the toughest you imagine consuming that number of gels or that volume of sports drink over a 40 hour race it's just not even not even not even feasible so right this kind of idea of 90 grams per hour is uh is a misnomer for me particularly if you're getting solid food and we've got to think about how palatability changes we know that ultra runners tend to favor more savory foods as the race duration goes on so um we've got to think about the practicality of those recommendations yeah i i'm with you on that because i see this 60 to 90 grams per hour recommendation touted a lot and while i understand the science behind it and i understand this these multiple channels that carbohydrates can be uh absorbed through the uh through the gut just to your earlier point from a practical standpoint it's not tenable like no like very very very few people can actually get away with that and practice for more than a few hours and then the other thing i actually come back to is even if you could do that it's not necessary based on the caloric expenditure like if you actually look if you actually dial down to okay how many carbohydrates

do you need to replace for everybody but the most elite athletes it's not 90 grams 360 calories every single hour in order to um in order to to not completely deplete the glycogen stores so you look at this and it's like well a it's based on elite athletes and very few people are elite athletes b it's as you mentioned it's based in a triathlon and marathon setting and this is not triathlon or marathon i think we have to move those for for an ultra marathon recommendation we've got to move them down to something more that's more practical one of the really interesting things in terms of of carbohydrate and caloric absorption that i think is fascinating that i want to get your uh take on is nor is is notice we didn't say grams per hour or sorry we're using grams per hour but we're not using grams per unit body weight meaning we can apply these same recommendations for the most part to a smaller athlete and a larger athlete and it doesn't appear that size that body weight has a whole lot to do with how athletes can actually absorb carbohydrates which which is counterintuitive to a lot of people because they would think a larger person bigger you know stomach mass or you know more stomach lining to to absorb the carbohydrates that doesn't seem to be the case does it not in the case of carbohydrate absorption you're absolutely right that there are going

to be different rates of carbohydrate absorption among different runners but it's not it's not going to be body mass dependent and so this is this is when the the science the the broad recommendations from science go a little bit out the window because individual tolerability is the key thing here and it's about figuring out what you can individually tolerate so i get asked in an inordinate amount of the time you know how much carbohydrate should i be taking it usually for marathon a lot of people run marathon fewer people run ultra but they'll ask me how how many gels or how much sports drink should i be taking in over the course of my marathon and i'll always respond the same i'll i'll i'll say well as much as you can feasibly tolerate as much as you you can feasibly tolerate and the only way you're going to figure that out is through practice and we know that you can train the gut we've mentioned this a couple of times by subjecting your gastrointestinal system to higher volumes of carbohydrate intake over a period of time and in periodic training sessions you can train your gut to absorb higher volumes of carbohydrate at given running speeds that obviously takes time it's got to be done in training but individual tolerance is the key yeah and also with the we'll move to gut training and i want to kind of come back to some of the fat intake and the protein intake that we need to be concerned about during racing but since we already skipped to the you know training the gut piece this is another area that i that

i uh found that i find quite fascinating the first lens that i look at this through is not this the the really scientific ricardo costa study that that is that has been passed around now type of lens it says okay if we you know if we if we if we have athletes take in a higher level of carbohydrates we see these types of things happen in the body at the cellular level at a chemical level that they're that they're that then is going to enable them to absorb more carbohydrates i look at it from uh what is the athlete going to ask of themselves during a race how much how many calories am i going to ask them to take that to take in during a race and it's normally 250 calories or something like that 50 grams of carbs an hour some somewhere around there and so we need to train that i need to train the athlete to be able to do that and i liken it to i would never ask an athlete that trains at 10 minute pace all day to go and run a race at eight minute pace nobody would ever do that but yet from a gut tolerance standpoint and from a fueling standpoint athletes do that constantly they go out on training runs and they fuel at 150 calories an hour or even 100 calories an hour because they can get away with it right because four hour training run three hour training run things like that you can get away with that for that training run but then in the race they're asking their body to process

250 calories 300 calories an hour and things like that and it's such a big training mismatch that shouldn't be that that that you should get the analogy and so that's like the first lens that i look at this training the gut piece through is you have to train the athlete to be able to tolerate the calories that you anticipate that being able to tolerate during the race and the only way you can do that is in training but relevant to this training the gut thing we're actually starting to see some like mechanistic happenings going on when we actually do it in a research setting when we feed people higher amounts of fuel and carbohydrates they adapt to being able to absorb those carbohydrates yeah and it's characteristic of athletes in general placing relatively more emphasis on periodizing their training as opposed to periodizing their nutrition it's perfectly in everything you said is so intuitive that you wouldn't expect somebody to to do all of their the majority of their training at a 10 minute mile pace and then go out and run an eight minute mark because your body's going to say hey what's what's happening here that's going to be a shock to the system exactly the same with the gut and particularly when the gut is so susceptible to these these big changes and and if there's one thing that's going to scuple you doesn't matter how fit you are doesn't matter how many miles you've you've got in the bank so how many no matter how many world titles you have if your gut shuts down you're done that's it there's you there's no there's nobody who there's no mental willpower that you can't you can't just you know tough it out

it's if your gut shuts down you can't eat or drink you're done so um this is kind of one of the first things that we should think about especially when there's so much where you say exactly as you said the cost is doing some excellent work in this area that shows that the guy is trainable we're starting to see that getting a mechanistic understanding of how this works now and there's so much research on how gastrointestinal distress seems to be one of the most commonly reported reasons for for non-finishing for dnfs in races it's oh yeah absolutely i think um just anecdotally yep i'm again just going back to to when we were in chamonix we tested 30 athletes and i'd say 25 of them uh came back reporting really severe bouts of gastrointestinal distress at least half of them had thrown up somewhere on the catheter somewhere on the course and i think that was one of the contributing factors it was very very hot and there were extremes of temperature in that race much more severe than in in recent years but it's so it's so common it's so prevalent prevalent that we should we've got to be looking at this first and foremost is how do we overcome this and how do we train the gut so that during racing we're doing whatever we can to mitigate that gi distress well and another thing that's that's that's that's prevalent that we actually see in practice is athletes really don't know so there's an educational component that needs to happen on the front end yeah we can say you need to take in you know 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour and things like that but a lot of times athletes are kind of clueless about what

that actually means in the real world and we have this really nifty um exercise that we have them do when they come to one of our training camps where we get to like meet and train with them in person it's it's super simple we just have them save all of their rappers from a four or five hour run and then when they when they come back they dump them out on all out on the table and we record the calories the sodium and then the fluid that they actually have to took in that they actually took in so that's the one thing that they have to memorize is how much fluid that they that they that they actually took in and then we say this is how many calories per hour that um that you took in this is how much fluid per hour that you actually took in and this is the amount of milligrams of sodium per unit fluid that you took in throughout the entire run that's the piece that has the most amount of math and it's really not that difficult but just by dumping it all that trash out on the table and saying okay well i took in 800 calories but i went on a five hour run that's way less than 200 calories an hour a lot of times the light but you know those light bulbs start to go off with the athlete of how under fueled they actually are and how conscientious they need to be about man i really need to i really need to step my game up in this uh in this area because i'm going to be asking my body to do to taking calories at a higher rate that i'm doing in training i think that's a really nice exercise

because it makes it much more tangible when you can quantify things very clearly very very easy exercise that this is approximately how many calories you're burning this is how many calories you're taking in same with fluid because it's not something that people often give any thought to and it's and it's so critical yeah even then you know how often have you have you been milling around at the start of a race or even at the at a race expo and there are people queuing up trying samples of of different gels and foods that they've never tried before it's like i'm thinking i'm thinking of trying this tomorrow what do you think like well have you have you used this in training like what are you playing at of course you shouldn't be trying this for the first time tomorrow yeah so let's dial it down to the practical though because we have this huge range of what athletes can take in the the way that i do it is i split i just split it down the middle and educate first and i start and this is almost any athlete elite athlete big athlete small athlete i i don't really change it that much i say let's target 240 to 260 calories an hour and let's just do it all from carbohydrate which which ends up which ends up being pretty simple right two and a half gels two to three gels per hour every hour two gels and a little bit of sports drink one gel and a whole lot of sports drink we can come up with those combinations but 240 to 260 calories an hour on your next long run go out do that let's see how it feels and then based on how that how that feels in 240 260

calories an hour is going to be 60 grams of carbohydrates so the lower end of that range that we were just mentioning 60 and 90 grams of carbohydrates go out on the run and you see how they feel if they feel great let's see if we can ratchet that up and either train the gut or see where their personal tolerance is if it's not great let's ratchet it down to where their personal tolerance is work there for a little bit and then see if we can and then see if we can ratchet it up i think that going through and that takes a long time because you can't do this on 90 minute runs or even two hour runs because the feedback that you get is not as valid because the exercise isn't as stressful but when you do that for four or five or six months for all the long runs that's when they can really get those calorie ranges dialed it just takes time just like any piece of training but the strategy of like starting somewhere in the middle using that as a calibration point and then titrating up or titrating down from there that that's how i get that's how i get these enormous ranges dialed down for each individual athlete i don't know what you think about that yeah you've got to play the long game i've been saying this for years is is that you can't start thinking about your nutrition a month before a given race and expect everything to go you wouldn't start training for a race well some people do for sure but um they're unlikely to be winning any medals um and they're probably doing a lot of damage to their bodies but but the point is yes you've got to play the long game you've got to start thinking

about these things six months you know a year out from your race and start start training your nutrition just like you would just like you're thinking about periodizing your training program because at the end of the day in a race you you are going to it we've already established that it's impossible to meet your calorie requirements and the the harder you run the more carbohydrates you're going to burn we know that typically during ultra marathon we can sustain more fat and we know that our because we're working at a lower intensity so we're oxidizing relatively more fat we know that our tastes are going to change if you run races that last more than 12 hours we know that that there's a a taste preference that shifts away from sweet foods and more over to savory salty foods probably because it reflects more of a chemical imbalance in the body so all of these things have to be considered holistically it's no good just you know a month out of from a given race and start seeing how many gels you can tolerate but you've got to start planning your nutrition really long in advance yep i think that's a really good way to phrase it is you wouldn't start training a month before an event let's not think about your nutrition a month before an event um we tend to be a little bit over fixed on carbohydrates as a source of energy and this is a little bit of a byproduct from all of the marathon and triathlon research that is heavily carbohydrate dependent just because of the intensity but that might not necessarily translate to an ultra marathon uh setting and we do know that there

is a role for some fat and some protein intake during an ultra so let's let's divide up those two macros next for uh for recommendations for an ultra what do we know about fat intake during an ultra and what should athletes be doing from that perspective yeah and and as i've already mentioned because ultra marathons tend to be run at a slower velocity than you know the same person would run a marathon then the the gut has a greater propensity for absorbing nutrients if you're working at a very high intensity anything above say 65 vo2 max you know that the rate of gastric emptying is going to be reduced it's going to be compromised because the blood flow is redirected to the exercising limbs so your ability to to break down and absorb nutrients through the gut is compromised during ultra marathon it's a little bit different because you're working at relatively lower intensities so you can tolerate foods that have more calories and that have high concentrations of fat or higher quantities of fat i should say and the types of food that you can get away with eating in an ultra marathon is going to be very different to what you can get away with in a typical marathon when you're running at much higher speeds so we know that we can tolerate more fat and fat has a really important role to play because it's so much more energy dense so carbohydrate typically four calories per gram fat is up to nine calories per gram so over a long period of time we know that fat is much more

energy efficient so we need to be moving away from this idea of purely carbohydrate and we need to be getting in a mix of macronutrients so fat is relatively easier to absorb during ultra marathon than it would be in any race of shorter distance and we know that it gives us many more calories per unit but ultra marathon is one of those sports where we we can start to we can think about eating more normal foods very few people are going to run an ultra marathon on sports drinks and gels just doesn't happen and it's not necessary because of the relatively low running speeds you don't need to consume that the whole premise behind sports drinks and gels is that they're very readily absorbed they're absorbed very quickly through the system and provide very readily available source of energy for the re-synthesis of atp but we don't need such a rapid supply of energy during ultra marathon because we're running at lower slower speeds so we can eat more normal foods the the problem with that with this is is that we are to some extent limited by what's available at checkpoints and a lot of runners rely a little bit too heavily i would say on what's available at checkpoints so one of the principles behind writing this paper is it wasn't just for athletes and coaches but it was for race directors as well so that they could get an idea of the type of foods that athletes need during ultra marathon so that you know i've run so

many races where the food available at checkpoints was just dire you know i did a 100 miler a couple of years ago i won't mention the name of the race but but every single checkpoint you know throughout the this 100 mile race and we're talking about every 10 miles or so had the same food identical same food there was no real substantial kind of meal-based foods there it was all very much just snack products and there was hardly very little to no protein and um unfortunately i had some of my own food so i could take i could get some protein and i could get more fat-based products as well but it really was dire so you are to a certain extent limited by what's presented to you to you at checkpoints which is why understanding your own needs is so critical because then you can take some of your own food as well to make sure you're meeting your requirements but from a fat perspective i mean it's it's almost one of those things that because you can incorporate more fat into your race diet at ultra marathon uh versus uh any so any other uh higher intensity race you should but the reasons for that is is just because it makes your energy intake it makes your race nutrition plan this this is the way that i that i that i think about it from a practical perspective it makes that race nutrition plan more sustainable throughout the course of a long ultra marathon because it it gives you another tool to vary the

palatability which we're going to talk about a little bit it gives you another tool to vary that palatability up so it's not just sweet on sweet on sweet you have the opportunity to take in some foods that have a higher fat content which might be more savory or more salty well i think what's interesting is is that as the race goes on your if you listen to your body it will tell you what it needs because very soon you'll get taste fatigue with the carbohydrates and and soon you'll the idea of eating something very sweet will just make you feel nauseated you'll feel sick and you won't want to do it so you you have this natural kind of shift over towards more savory foods and i don't that's not that's not a coincidence the reason that that happens well it could be we don't know for sure but it could be because you're starting to become depleted in sodium and this that chemical imbalance drives the taste the change in taste preference but it but it's also quite likely to be the fact that you are energy depleted as well when you have this very large energy deficit your body starts craving foods that are more calorie dense so you get this shift towards a preference for more savory foods which just happen to have fat and salt in it yeah it's not it's not a coincidence your body tells you pretty much what it needs right yeah no yeah your body's pretty smart and um i think needless to say like you do have the opportunity to

have more foods that have a higher fat content and ultra and i think a lot of ultra athletes should just like we're talking about in the months leading up to their ultra marathon race should be can should be considering what are the whole array of foods that they're going to be taking in during the race of which they have the option to have some some foods with some fat content and here in the us i to to your point that this um that this consensus statement one of the end users of this is going to be the race directors i think a lot of race directors have started to to to realize that and it's it's driven i as ironic as this sounds it's driven from the feedback from their athletes hey we want more satiating fatty saltier foods later in the race as opposed to the beginning of the race and a lot of these race directors what they're doing is their aid stations for a hundred mile race at mile 80 and mile 70 and 75 they look completely different than they do at mile 20 and mile 30 and the way that they look completely different is they're starting to shift towards the quesadillas and the tater tots and the you know soups and things like that later in the races there's earlier the race it's all like you know candy and energy gels and sports drink and things like that sure but but i think and that's so important and i've i've only run a couple of ultras in the in the states since i've been been over there and from my from you know an end of two i've noticed that it seems to be better in the states

than it is in the uk that's not to say it's the same in every race in the uk or in europe but but i think the point that you touched on is that race directors are starting to take note of that and it's supplying more real food you know particularly if you let's say you have a hundred mile race or over let's say it lasted 24 hours you would never go a normal day you would never go for 24 hours without having a meal and you go for 24 hours you've skipped what three four five proper meals and yet you add the fact that you're running 100 miles on top of that you expect to fuel yourself by by eating jelly babies and peanuts and pringles you know you need to you're skipping multiple meals and i think there's even a line in the paper where i can't i'm paraphrasing paraphrasing myself here but but uh it was something along the lines of we urge race directors to provide more real food more meals especially when they're running races that span multiple meal times uh you know you might start a race at 6 a.m and you might not finish until midnight you're gonna need to oh well real food in there you know as as as a personal experience i did tour de giant uh last year and uh my wife uh came out to crew for me for that uh which is a pretty good gig by the way because the crewing for tour de giant is like you know 10 or 20 hours in between when you can see your runners so you could go and you can you know hang out with them

and then go and sleep or have a nice meal or go on your own run or whatever so but anyway like the the strategy to to summarize it is i'm gonna have all my meals when i see you so just bring me a pizza and that's exactly what she did we added some other things but the main thing was just bring me a pizza they're easy to find in italy of course right the homeland of pizzas and i sat there and i ate a copious amount of pizza at every you know life base which is roughly every 50 kilometers that i could see her at and then when i left i would have sports drinks gels choose maybe some you know other kind of you know nicks and nacks that i would pick up from the uh from the refugios but having that meal timing roughly every 50k and trying to keep on some sort of regular meal timing became a really critical piece of that whole puzzle yeah for sure it's punctuating the constant stream of snack food with meals with real milk that break up the break up the taste fatigue but also give you a calorie dump you know you're going to sit there and eat some pizza that's not 150 calories that's an awful lot more and it's much more sustainable that way yeah okay let's move on protein we alluded to this several minutes ago um that this is going to be a really interesting uh aspect so what do we know about protein intake during an ultra marathon race well we spoke about the fact that all of the literature that we have available suggests that we need to get in order to optimize muscle protein synthesis on a day-to-day

basis we need to be getting protein every three to four hours and that seems to be the optimum strategy so why when we're competing in an ultra marathon that might last 12 hours 24 48 hours however long it well why would anyone voluntarily choose to emit protein from their diet and it's something that a lot of athletes do they think about carbohydrates and fats because it's that's considered to be important for energy metabolism but you wouldn't again you wouldn't go a whole day without consuming any protein so it's even more critical when you're running an ultra because you're putting your body through such a uh substantial degree of muscle strain muscle stress so we we've got to find a way to get more protein into the race diet and again it can be difficult sometimes because you again you are a little bit um you have to depend on the extent to which you're provided with protein at checkpoints unless you take your own food so some race directors are catching on now but if they're not you've got to be prepared so you've got to take your own sources of protein so how do we do that in practice well you can you can take protein bars you know take energy bars that have protein in them and there are lots of these available that have at least 20 grams of of protein so one of those will will last you you know for three four hours think about the same strategy trying to get protein every three to four hours or so

um you can think about supplementing we've we kind of touched upon bcaa's there are a couple of reasons why taking amino acids or a or a or one of the um essential amino acids or the bcaa's because not only does it provide you with a valid source of protein but it can potentially help to offset this central fatigue which has been researched a little it's not it's not absolutely decisive but there's some very interesting research on central fatigue in very very long duration exercise and central fatigue is basically an accumulation of tryptophan and serotonin in the brain and when you get an accumulation of serotonin it it generates feelings of lethargy and tiredness now these are not sensations that you really want to experience when you're trying to run an ultramarathon so the way that we can start to offset that is to supplement with branch chain amino acids and they compete for transport across the blood brain barrier and can to some extent mitigate the accumulation of tryptophan and serotonin in the brain so it can in some studies help to offset this kind of central fatigue which is only likely to happen in very very long duration exercise so bcaa's might be a relatively valid means of yes addressing central fatigue getting your protein intake but but again you know i stress that if you're if you're eating

normal food and you're getting you're meeting your protein demands through normal food then you probably don't need bcaa's or any kind of supplement at all but where are you getting your protein from that's the question you need to ask and it doesn't take much i mean you mentioned i think a lot of people will think well i don't want to eat a protein bar you know all in one sitting during an ultramarathon race it's like no no no that's not 20 grams of protein over the course of a few hours is is yeah you have to be mindful about it but that doesn't mean you're eating copious amounts of beef jerky all at once to improve your ultramarathon performance it's it means that some reasonably spaced out and strategically taken in bits of protein throughout an ultra is completely reasonable yeah for sure and and okay let's break that down so it's it's 10 grams every two hours for example 10 grams is not a lot no um it it's really not and and you'll find and again i'm curious to know what your experience of this is but when i've done the really long stuff i i'm i'm craving very high salt foods you know i did marathon day salve in 2011 uh feels like a lifetime ago now but and again the heat plays a factor but but uh you know you you start craving beef jerky and pepper army and anything that's very very salty anything that's uh that isn't energy gels just goes down so wonderfully well you know because it's the other end of the spectrum so you find that you're craving more of this stuff anyway it's easier to get in yeah and i

don't know you know once this is just like this start this is personal anecdote right because i've heard this theory thrown out your body is craving what it wants and i get it that totally makes intuitive sense if you're you know if you're if you're sodium uh if you're if you're so if you have a sodium deficit you're going to crave salty things i get it that makes totally sense but in another sense i'm like well your body's probably craving just something different than what it's been taking in for the last seven hours and it might not necessarily be that you're deficient or that you have some sort of decrement of sodium or whatever you're craving it might just be like hey dude i'm like complete i am completely over the sweet stuff give me anything else so it's independent of what these individual like deficits or what or whatever level are and so i don't i don't know what to chalk it up to other than to say it coming back to the research it is well demonstrated that those taste preferences change throughout the course of an ultra i think it's the root of what those changes are that can that we can kind of come into question yeah that's very erudite because there's lots of research showing that taste preferences change why that happens we don't know yeah i couldn't agree more it may be because of chemical imbalances it may be because of certain deficiencies what we do know is that the people who are more successful in ultramarathon eat more calories and drink more fluid that's it and even

when normalized for the duration of time that you're running the people who don't finish tend to not consume as many calories and are not consuming as much fluid yep so whatever you need to consume if your body is craving a certain food then you eat it because in the absence of anything else you've got to take in what you can stomach and if you're craving a very particular type of food this is where the kind of the science goes out the window a little bit you've you can only follow a strategy so far but at some point it kind of becomes survival just get in what you can get in as much as you can tolerate and whatever you are craving that's better than the alternative yep and one thing that i've that i've seen more often than i'd like to in in ultra is uh people failing to finish races because they feel nauseated because their gut has shut down and there are various reasons for that which we can talk about if you like but the gut was shut down blood sugar levels will drop people feel sick and they stop eating and that exacerbates the problem and one of the strategies that it's not evidence-based and this is where kind of again the science goes out the window and we i don't want to be making recommendations that are not evidence-based but sometimes to break that suck that downward cycle that downward spiral of increasing feelings of sickness and calorie

deficits is to actually force feed yourself now again this is purely anecdotal but i found that when i start feeling sick in an ultra if i take a break and actually take a respite from running and give myself maybe 10 minutes 15 minutes to actually force some food down if i can get a substantial bolus of calories i feel way better yeah there's no literature on that and there's no ethical way to study it either but i think often the cause of feelings of sickness and the cause of gi distress is chronic calorie deficit so you've got to find a way to break that i'm keen to get your thoughts yeah there could there could be something to that and i i don't know i mean i shrugged my shoulders at it meaning i've had both experiences i've had i've had i've had both myself and with athletes i've had them be able to alleviate nausea both by let's just shut the calories off for the next hour and let you reset and let's just as you mentioned let's sit down and force feed sometimes i've had both of those work and both of those go south and it's like i just kind of come i just kind of come back to the guessing game and kind of knowing uh uh knowing the athlete and also being able to track are you really in a caloric deficit in order to force feed i think that that's part of the equation that gets left out as well i i really boil this this this this thing down to

the first thing that we talked about that you actually need to train your strategy right you need to train if you if you expect to be able to take in 250 calories an hour during the race you'd actually need to train that for months on end part of the months on end piece um what that also enables you to do is to add different food stuffs into the arsenal because all too often athletes they take the easy way they're like okay i'm going to go out i'm going to grab two gels that are in the closet right and they don't take the time to think well that's not all i'm going to eat during an ultra i'm going to eat it you know possibly quesadilla or have some soup or have some sort of real food and they forget to train that part of their nutrition plan the real food part of their nutrition plan during training and one of the strategies that i try to arm my athletes with when they're when they're working out these nutrition programs is to give them as many arrows in the quiver as possible that they can draw from during race day so when they do get sick of the strawberry gel that they're taking into they know and they have a lot of confidence in something else that they can take in that will provide them calories because a lot of this and i talked i talked to patrick wilson who wrote a really great book uh called the athlete's gut that just came out i talked to him about this a lot of the gi distress that we can uh that we experience during ultra runs yes it has to do with like food

intolerance but there's also some psychology that goes behind it as well and if you're constantly thinking oh i don't know what i'm going to eat my stomach's starting to turn south like that that becomes a negative reinforcement loop that keeps rolling down this hill that's hard to to push it back up where you're fighting both physiology and psychology and i would i would extend that by saying that's where experience comes in not just experience and training but experience running races because you you know what to expect you know what it feels like you you know what's worked in the past you know what hasn't worked so it is a little bit of trial and error especially in a sport that that there's a lot we don't know about the science and the mechanisms of how the body responds we're working on it but there's there's a lot we there's an awful lot we don't know so in this sport perhaps more than most where your gut can respond so unpredictably in some circumstances it is a little bit trial and error and having just having that experience gives you some confidence to go out there and and just kind of yeah see what happens and know that you can respond to it well and to that point you know we give these ranges and let's just use 150 calories an hour to 400 calories an hour right is that is that the range that was cited in the paper i flipped over that page 150 calories an hour to 400 calories an hour i there are a lot of circumstances where i'm going to have an athlete that can't even do 150 calories an hour let's just say it's 120 i would rather have them do 120 and be completely

confident in that part in that plan they've done it in training they know it's rock solid they know they can do it for hours and hours and hours they know the different types of foodstuffs that they can take in i would rather like violate some of that some of the scientific uh uh consensus statement right position paper that you wrote i would rather violate that to a certain extent for for the added benefit of confidence as opposed to trying to force feed somebody into the range that they're not that they're not necessarily going to be able to tolerate yeah i'd support that you know these are these are broad estimates based on what we know but to emphasize again there's an awful lot we don't know i think if somebody can only tolerate you know i i know you that was an example i don't know if you actually have an athlete like that that's a that's a very low intake but if that i do yeah i mean and that's fair enough i would um i would i would argue that perhaps that's something that perhaps that's psychological perhaps it's something that can be trained i don't know if they're able to to run for very long sustained periods of time but um but hey no look i i agree you can't force somebody to do something that they're not comfortable doing yeah because i've been in the i've been i've been in the position where i've had very good athletes that can win races win very high caliber races off of 200 calories an hour and you would look at that and go okay we can get you even better if for whatever

reason we bumped you up to 250 and we've tried to do that and failed and then gone back to 200 calories an hour but the key in the whole equation is recognizing the opportunity early enough out testing it in training and then deciding if it's a positive or negative where people go awry we keep coming back to this time proposition of training is when they're trying to do it all in the last month of the race because then you're just guessing because you don't know what direction the arrow is going to go at that point it could go up it could go down it could go sideways but the point is is we gave it enough time and training to kind of flush those things out and sometimes it works and sometimes and so what we did we just moved it down to 200 calories an hour that's the standard we tried to move it we tried to actually move it a couple times and hey athletes winning races let's just like let's just leave it at that we still need to train it still need to practice it but we're not going to try to move out of that individual tolerance because we've already proven over multiple over multiple rounds that it's not compatible through it's super interesting um okay let's pivot really quick before we end up with a six hour podcast uh we spend a lot of time talking about calories absolutely 100 percent uh uh uh an important thing but i think something that's more important than calories in an ultra marathon context is actually a hydration in fact a lot in a lot of cases or in a lot of ways you can make the argument that you can have the perfect requisite amount of calories coming in but if

your hydration strategy goes awry those calories are not nearly as meaningful or meaningful at all and hydration has always been it hasn't been contentious but as a practitioner i have been very frustrated with some of the standard recommendations that have come out over the course of my coaching career and i'm going to stylize this really quickly through the lens of what the american college of sports medicine has recommended for athletes just in the last 20 years that i've been coaching they have moved from uh uh height from a hydration recommended uh recommendation of drink as much as tolerable that was when i first started coaching that was their recommendation 18 years ago or something like that drink as much as tolerable to drink to thirst to now drink to thirst with these five caveats and i you know i banged my head against the wall a little bit because i'm like it's water it's not water but you know i'm going to simplify it a little bit it's water people like it's one of these fundamental elements that if we've changed it so radically over the course of not really that long of a period of time what is it going to be five years from now so it's starting to merge in ultras in the exact same way it wasn't that long ago that high profile races like the western states 100 they used to use

body weight as a medical check to determine if athletes could continue so you'd come into an aid station and if you were more than eight percent below what you were when you weighed in the day before before the race start they would either not let you continue or they would just pull you for or or sorry they would either hold you at the aid station or they would not let you continue it'd be kind of a forced uh uh forced for forced dnf now they since reversed that policy and it actually turns out it's the opposite like we should be encouraging some amount of weight loss um in an ultra marathon but just to see that transpire in ultras i use that as a story to to really demonstrate how something relatively simple like hydration can actually be really rather confounding confounding in in in the real world so let's start let's start with this very let's start with the highest level possible in an ultra marathon race should athletes be gaining trying to maintain or lose weight based on their hydration status like that big gross level do we know enough about what to say about that the reality is that athletes are going to become dehydrated in the same way that athletes are going to fail in completely offsetting their calorie expenditure you're not going to be able to consume it's very unlikely that you're going to be

able to consume enough fluid to completely offset dehydration but the key of course is to mitigate it as much as possible the research that's available number one shows that the athletes that are more successful and that have more more successful race finishes tend to drink more and the more successful athletes athletes follow hydration strategies and and i think that's the key there are a lot of people who suggest that drink to thirst is a viable strategy and most likely in shorter duration exercise or exercise that's performed in thermo neutral environments drink to thirst is viable we can't say that it definitely doesn't work in ultra but i don't think it's safe to start advocating drink to thirst in races that might last for 24 hours because again just to reinforce this the most successful athletes and the athletes who have more successful finishes in races tend to follow a hydration strategy so whether that's drinking a certain number of mils or ounces relative to body weight or following strict guidelines you know for example in the paper we suggest drinking between 150 to 250 milliliters every 20 minutes it does come down to a certain extent to tolerability but drinking to thirst i'm not a big fan of especially because a lot of athletes take in their

electrolytes in their fluid so if you're drinking to thirst there's a good chance that you're going to become deficient in one or more electrolytes particularly sodium and and what you're advocating for in the paper and you can clarify this uh because i'm sure there's a little bit of nuance to it is drinking to an individualized schedule meaning go meaning throughout the process of training figuring out what that schedule is going to be not making up the schedule i guess is what i'm getting at right because you could make it up and totally be wrong yeah but figuring out what your hydration needs are in fact going to be on race day and and and and drinking to that now one of the things that i don't want to get kind of lost in translation here is the most successful athletes drink the most that doesn't necessarily mean that we need to be drinking as much as possible because as we've seen from the earlier acsm flip-flop that i just uh that i just pointed out that can cause just as many problems in fact more problems than uh than are worth and in fact that's the from a medical standpoint which is different than a performance standpoint but from a medical standpoint one of the things that uh all the medical directors are fearful of now are having over hydrated hyponatremic cases coming in after an ultramarathon which can be can be fatal we've seen that in triathlon and to my knowledge i don't think we've seen that in ultra yet although i could i i i uh

could be mistaken there might be cases out there that have not been reported um but in triathlon it's it certainly has happened that's different than than than what you're advocating you're not advocating drink drink drink as much as possible let's figure out what a schedule actually looks like and go from there yeah i'm glad you highlighted that because yes you exactly you want to be drinking enough to to mitigate as much as possible dehydration what you must not do is take all too literally the advice of drink plenty of water you know we we see this advice banded around particularly at marathons make sure you drink plenty of water and if it's hot drink more and then there's you know somebody will go off and drink 10 liters and end up uh in hospital no so the point is you you want to in advance you want to figure out approximately what your individual sweat rate is we've mentioned you can do that by measuring your body mass pre and post typical sessions seeing what your sweat rate is and then following typical guidelines to to try and offset your weight loss which is going to come predominantly from fluid now obviously as you exercise more you might become glycogen depleted and and and and so you've got to take that into account as well and we retain about two milliliters of water for every gram of carbohydrate that we that we uh store in the muscles and liver but when you take all of that into account we need to be drinking enough to to offset dehydration as much as possible that we've got to think about the consequences of dehydration here

it's it's not just an exercise capacity thing so on on the one hand when when we sweat we we lose fluid and it's going to affect exercise capacity because the sweat has to come from somewhere but a lot of people often don't think where when when we increase our sweating rate during exercise the sweat actually comes from the blood so our blood volume is going to shrink when we become dehydrated and so that means your heart has to work harder to pump the same volume of blood around the body so your exercise capacity or your exercise reserve or call your cardiac reserve is going to diminish so once you become dehydrated your exercise capacity is going to suffer the other thing to consider is that your cognitive function is going to suffer as well when you become dehydrated that's a problem on any course that requires navigation anytime you're running over challenging terrain so if it's a trail or rocky trail or mountainous terrain then you're going to increase your chance of rolling an ankle or getting or sustaining some other kind of injury so we've got to try and do everything we can to mitigate dehydration and before we go on to talk about hyponatremia there are there are two kind of things to try and avoid we want to try and avoid consuming excessive volumes of water because then we dilute the available sodium in our bodies but we also want to try and avoid drinking fluid that doesn't contain any sodium at all because then it has a very similar effect you dilute the available sodium in your body

and that's when you get into problems but if you can offset dehydration maintain your electrolyte balance as much as possible then you get you then you get the uh the balance right yeah the the great sodium debate as i always mention uh with with our coaches which has also gone through its similar phases but let's stay around just the fluid parts of it a little bit and i know we we can't completely uh on an i know we can't completely disassociate fluid from electrolytes but i want to i want to stay on this concept of you need to mitigate the amount of dehydration that might not be complete that statement night might not be completely analogous to we need to mitigate the amount of weight loss and that's what a lot of athletes because we use this sweat test to find out how much you're actually sweating in an hour in an ultramarathon because it's so long you're losing body you're losing body weight by other means not just the sweat that's evaporating uh off of your skin and i think what that what therefore happens is is it leads a lot of athletes to believe that they either need to replace a hundred percent of that weight loss or even more and obviously more we would we would call that a big no-no but what's starting what's starting to emerge that i want to get your take on is is it's it's likely

not a hundred percent that we actually need to replace it's something less than that but we don't quite we don't really quite know is what i'm what i'm getting at and that's something that i've personally been trying to put like a finger on the pulse a little bit better and i haven't i can't say that i fully flushed it out so what are your thoughts on that if we go through a sweat test and let's just say that the conditions in the race are exactly like the condition we have the perfect equation right would we then would we then be able to translate that to okay you're losing 500 mils an hour in these conditions we need to replace exactly that for a really long ultra can we extend it to that or does it need to be some fraction of that loss yeah it's a good question and i think if you've if you've got a pretty robust measure of your sweating rate so let's say you've done a pre-to-post training session body mass measurement maybe if you're really lucky you've got access to a lab like we spoke about earlier and you've done a sweat patch test and you've you've actually calculated exactly what the sweating rate is you want to try and match that as closely as possible because what you've got to remember is that um yes there is a little bit of scope to become dehydrated okay two percent dehydration it's not going to cause you a great deal of problem okay you start getting performance decrements at about two percent but it's not it's not going to land you in hospital you know if you lose two percent body mass but unlike with energy intake we've got a we've got a large degree of uh excess energy on

our body even very very lean athletes have many many thousands tens of thousands of calories stored as body fat even if you're six eight percent body fat you've got a lot of energy reserve we don't have an awful lot of fluid reserve so once you start sweating for a long period of time particularly in much much longer again you've got to think about the duration of the race it's a six hour race maybe even at eight ten twelve hour race the consequences of chronic dehydration are much less severe than dehydration in a 24 hour race there's much less maneuverability so from my perspective i'm going to want to try and match my fluid intake as much as possible i think it's easier to do it with fluid than it is with food because water is it should be relatively tasteless and then you know i want to touch on on something um some applied advice that we tried i tried to crowbar into the paper if if you're drinking pure water it's much easier because the water it's relatively tasteless and actually it can offer a respite if you're eating foods that are making you feel nauseated sometimes water is is perfect antidote because it doesn't taste about of anything sometimes you can get into the problem if you're treating your water with flavorings to make it taste better or you're adding electrolytes to it because it it makes the water taste different makes it relatively less palatable over a very long period of time one of the things that i that i experienced when i did sahara and again this is slightly different because the ambient temperatures are so high but i was adding electrolytes

to my water in effervescent tabs you know you can plop the tab in your water and it fizzes up and uh okay that's fine for a couple of hours but it makes it gives the water this slightly kind of metallic-y salty taste because that you're literally adding salt to your water very hot conditions temperature of your water increases so over the course of the the day and you're running for anywhere between six and twelve hours on any given stage you're trying to force this this salty tasting warm water down and it makes you feel sick inevitably you drink less of it so not only is your hydration going to suffer but your electrolyte intake is going to suffer as well and it's even more crucial in those kinds of conditions so you know we've got to think about trying to keep the water relatively untreated if we can unless you've got a foolproof you know bulletproof strategy to the contrary so the water just tastes as neutral as possible you're more likely to drink it so would you be advocating for is though is getting your electrolytes from a different source as opposed to the as opposed to the fluid and not trying to combine them which is not what we see in sports drinks right sports drinks are trying to deliver fuel electrolytes and fluid all at the same time fuel in the form of carbohydrates electrolytes electrolytes primarily in the form of sodium and fluids obviously waters that is is a delivery mechanism for that and you've got a ratio here which i was quite pleased to see because it's

one that um that that we've used in practice here it's at least pretty close to one that we've used in practice here that that you're that you need to be consuming 500 to 700 milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid that you're actually consuming and the way that i'm interpreting that is sodium from all sources not just sodium from the fluid sources it's sodium from the gels that you're taking in and the effervescent tablets that you're putting into your water or the you know the quesadilla that you ate or something like that and that's that's in order to maintain this electrolyte balance that is that that is critical because we really can't we really can't separate the fluid needs from the electrolyte needs completely we always have to think about them in constant yeah and this is where the scientific recommendations do sometimes clash with the with the realities and this is why one of the reasons i wanted to write this paper because all the stuff that had come before had been written for the most part not always by people who had never run ultramarathon now i i don't know what it's like from your experience but i'm willing to bet that that most of the runners that you work with don't consume sports drink for the entire duration of the race because of the issues of palatability and changing shifts in in taste preferences so if you're relying on your on your electrolyte intake or if you're if you're

relying to get your electrolyte intake on your on your fluid if they're if the two are kind of intertwined then you're going to run into problems if the the fluid that you're drinking isn't palatable anymore so one of the bits of advice that i managed to get into the paper and again this this hasn't really been studied but it's in it's a nice kind of practical nugget of information is try and keep your water relatively untreated so that it's as palatable as possible and get your electrolytes or your sodium in tablets that you can swallow whole now there's a minority of people who can't take tablets and i understand that's an issue and there's probably a minority of individuals who can consume electrolyte solutions for the entire duration of their ultra but i think most people will get sick and tired of that flavor pretty quickly so for me personally i think it's just prudent to keep your water untreated get your electrolytes from either tablets sodium tablets or electrolyte tablets that you can take whole yes take them at the same time but then offset your sodium intake with the other sources of sodium that you're consuming you're you're creating your sports drink concoction in your body as opposed to in the bottle is essentially what you're doing yeah well i'm really glad that you brought this up because a lot of times in scientific papers like the authors of these papers they run the other way from including either their own experience or some piece of anecdote or some strategy that hasn't been

studied in the literature as you've kind of alluded to they do everything they can to not have these in there so i'm appreciative of the fact that as you said you crowbarred it in there and i'm not sure how much pushback that you got from your fellow from your fellow co-authors but i'm sure that there is a little bit um i honestly think that it's a little bit of personal preference i mean from a practical perspective i have athletes that can't do sports drinks and so yeah we have to figure out how to deliver electrolytes through other mechanisms i do have other athletes that can tolerate a lighter sports drink for over half the majority of even the longest of ultras i don't have a lot of athletes although there are people out there i don't have a lot of athletes that can do all three in a sports drink meaning they get their calories their fluid and their electrolytes all from that you know they're using they're using fluid for everything there are drinks out there uh goo roctane for example that are intended to do that they're intended to deliver all the calories all the sodium and all the fluid in one you know convenient sports nutrition product i don't think that that's as viable of a strategy in an ultra marathon uh situation because as we alluded to in when we're talking about calories you need more options you need savory options you need sweet options you need salty options and also on the fluid side i think that you also need high and low or no calorie options that you can go to

the proportion it's a great example right water versus coke water has no calories coke is going to have a lot of calories it's a it's a relatively dense source of calories for a fluid at least if you know that your body can tolerate those those things and you test them out in training i like having those um i like having those arrows in a quiver more commonly what we see in practice from from how to actually deliver this is this is this this this strategy that my friend and my my colleague has coined i don't know if she coined it but she's the one that i've definitely heard it from the most and that's to keep your calories in your pocket and your hydration in your bottle and it's stacy sims so i can attribute this to you're doing that except you're you're you're keeping your hydration in your bottle your hydration and hydration being inclusive of electrolytes not just fluid yeah you're doing that but you're just doing it in your stomach instead of putting it all in your bottle yeah i i there's no downside to that from what i can see as long as you are cognizant of getting enough fluid to offset the hydration as much as possible getting enough electrolytes to make sure that you're not deficient getting enough calories it doesn't matter how you do it i don't think there's a i don't think there's a downside to that strategy i think one of the contentions about the electrolyte literature one of the arguments if you like is that there is some emerging literature that suggests that maybe we don't need to supplement with electrolytes and actually taking sodium might over

stimulate first which can have the opposite effect and to that i would say if you you shouldn't be supplementing electrolytes just to supplement electrolytes are you getting enough sodium and if you're getting enough you're getting enough it doesn't matter how you're getting it so and again this is in the paper you make sure that you take in enough sodium and enough electrolytes to make sure that you are not chronically deficient so you've got to offset that against whatever food that you're taking in we don't say supplement with tablets or supplement with electrolyte formulas we say make sure that you are meeting your sodium demands whatever they may be and this is a an approximate guideline of what you know a ballpark figure of what it's likely to be doesn't matter how you get that in and and the way that you're coming to the how much is there is per unit of fluid volume that could be adjusted based on temperature exactly because if it's hotter your sweat rate will increase you're going to need more fluid and you're going to need more electrolytes unless you're eating more salt in your food of course it's always got to be offset yeah but the way that the recommendation is oriented i think i think is extremely relevant it's per unit of total fluid that you're taking in 500 to 700 milligrams of sodium coming from all sources per unit of fluid that you have to take in

it's not 200 milligrams of sodium or whatever per hour it's not an hourly rate and i'm gonna go on a little bit of a rant and you can join me if you want to there there are no sponsors of this podcast and nor will they ever will be in one of the biggest reason why i don't ever want sponsors is because i can go on these rants and because my guests can go on these rants and not be fearful of the consequences but it drives me crazy when i see supplement companies deliver sodium recommendations for endurance athletes as a unit of time taking 200 milligrams of sodium per hour taking 150 milligrams of sodium per hour take these two pills of sodium supplementation per hour because i i nobody has demonstrated to me what the relevance is of sodium per unit time it's always per unit of sweat volume that you're that that you're sweating out so i don't am i completely missing the boat there am i like getting my panties all up in a wad for no reason or are you just as confused as those recommendations as i am no you're absolutely right a lot of the time it is it is take x amount per hour so sometimes depending on the on the product that you that you buy it will tell you to you know dissolve one tablet in 500 ml of water for example and then consume hourly but even again it's not recommended based on the on the specific scenario it's got to be scenario specific right it's got to depend on your

sweat rate it's got to depend on your your um individual tolerant tolerances but no i agree with you there's there's no there's no benefit in making those kind of very very vague recommendations i don't think it helps anyone and i think it just if anything it just muddies the water when it comes to trying to make scientific recommendations on this kind of topic yeah i i do think it's starting to fall out of favor because it used to be you came into an aid station and there were just a copious amount of electrolyte capsules on the table and people would just take them by the handfuls and shove them in their mouth and i'm like do you do you have any idea how much sodium you just took in all at the same time i'm starting to see that less and less but still every once in a while i run around i run i run across a sodium product that says take two of these per hour and i'm like okay well if you're the amount of fluid that you're taking in just happens to equal that right ratio then great but that's not you know you're just guessing that that's going to be the case and actually if you look at the electrolyte content particularly the sodium content of most sports drinks it's at the very very conservative end of the spectrum it may not even be enough if you're just relying on those supplements yeah but here's i actually think that that's smart and here's why because you're getting sodium from other sources so if we're using this range of 500 milligrams of sodium to 700 milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid that you need to take in and your electrolyte drink has 500 or 400 or even 350

milligrams of sodium per liter which is which is which is pretty common i mean you can look at like scratch labs is like i think it's like 680 or something like that but a lot of them are at as you mentioned at the bottom or even kind of below that range once you take into account the sodium that you're getting from other sources then you're good but that's assuming you're not taking in plain water which as you mentioned earlier and i agree with you there aren't a lot of people that can just go sports drink the entire time from a palatability perspective they're going to include some water so then you really need to be cognizant of the sodium that you're getting in from other sources yeah and one of the things that they'll be included in the paper it's just table four it's some example foods that are consumed by athletes we did it we did a kind of a little survey on a bunch of experienced ultra marathon runners and just got an idea of the type of foods that they typically consume during races and we assembled this uh this list of different foods and and the typical macronutrient micronutrient content and the sodium content as well and some of these foods are just they're packed full of sodium uh you know you've got um i'm just looking at some of the examples here you know salami sticks so this is like this is like uh i don't know what the what the equivalent in the us is but it's like um like pepper armies over here yeah slim jim's i don't know if you're allowed slim jim's yeah or something like that there's there's like in uh in a typical serving there's

like a gram of salt you know that's an awful lot of salt in one serving uh and some uh some sports drinks and energy gels are packed full of sodium uh oat bars 250 milligrams we've got salted cashews 200 milligrams olives have 300 milligrams of sodium uh per 50 grams so that's about a handful so yeah the the sodium that you're taking in always has to be offset against whatever you're taking through foods you've got to look at this holistically for sure yeah and that's why that's why i go back to that extra that inventory exercise because it teaches them how much fluid how many calories how much sodium and then relevant to this conversation how much the ratio of that sodium per unit of fluid that they're taking in they just need to be educated about all of all of that and making sure that they're getting within these right ratios i think the take-home message here is as you mentioned you can accomplish from from a hydration and a sodium perspective you can accomplish these magic ratios through a few different ways you can consume all water and then get sodium through your food and your sports nutrition products you can have a sports nutrition you can have a sports uh electrolyte beverage that uh that includes a lot of sodium the means to those ends can be slightly different but you have to be educated on how you're actually getting to that end yeah agreed i have nothing more okay

okay good we can end the great sodium debate there but i'm sure it will continue to rage on three years from now you're going to come back on this podcast and we'll be drinking the thirst again we will see i could there's another thing i could go off on an hour drink to thirst and ultra here's what i'll just say anybody who ever gives that recommendation drink to thirst and ultra marathon should go out and do bad water and see if that is relevant because if you run 135 miles across death valley in the searing heat with very little little humidity your capability of sensing thirst is completely messed up after that endeavor and if you're relying on thirst then good freaking luck i think i would say hey i couldn't agree more i would say after 12 hours of running in a thermoneutral environment your your your decision making abilities are gone you could get after 24 48 hours you don't even know what day it is you know so i think to allow such important decisions to kind of rest on on chance yeah okay i agree with you okay let's move on there's this really fascinating area of alleviating gi distress we've already we mentioned earlier that this is a huge issue in ultras it's the number one thing that uh ultra marathoners site as impacting their performance it's the biggest reason people drop out is gi distress what has one of the things that has emerged is all of these different like old wives tales that have some sort of rooting and some you know

bioplasical bioplasible pathway or some sort of research pathway that they can alleviate gi distress and they're everywhere it's ginger it's tom's it's take this you know super salty thing eat chicken soup you know taking some chicken soup you have your i'm gonna take a big bolus of calories to get rid of gi distress you have you have a you have a section here in here that very briefly addresses some of some some of the ways that or some of the strategies that you can use to minimize gi distress what can you tell what can you tell us about that all of these different strategies is there any commonality that we can pull out of that for if an athlete does get a sour stomach what could the remedy out from that be yeah well i would say that if you're running a race of sufficient distance particularly if the environmental temperatures are high it's a matter of when not if from in most cases um so so when you start to experience gi distress your strategy will depend on what what the underlying cause of the gi distress is now if you're chronically calorie deficient and you and your blood sugar levels start to drop which they may do then you know and you might get into a state of hyperglycemia which is a blood glucose concentration of less than 3.5 millimoles per liter used to be 2.5 i might have got that the wrong way around but it but

it's low anyway then that can make you feel sick that can cause this feeling of this this nauseated feeling in which case best strategy is to force some calories down and uh and in most cases that will help to raise your blood sugar level and alleviate the gi distress problem is is that if there's a different mechanism that's underpinning your gi distress which it is likely to be enforcing calories down isn't necessarily the best way to go so there's a couple of things at play here firstly you are requiring an awful lot from your gut so if you're consuming somewhere between let's say two and four hundred calories per hour for a very long period of time you're requiring an awful lot from your gut much more than you would on a day-to-day basis where you're where you're kind of delivering food bolus every you know three four five hours and then you're resting but if you're exercising particularly if you're running you're shaking it's there's a mechanical stress on the on the stomach as well in the gi system we know that running is much more likely to us to be associated with um with a degree of of gi bleeding because of the impact forces it's not not so much to the extent that you need to worry about it but you get a much greater turnover of what we call hemolysis breakdown of red blood cells with running as opposed to any other non-impact sport and with very prolonged exercise and particularly exercise in hot and humid conditions we get a redirection of blood flow this redirection

of cardiac output to the exercising muscles when that happens the blood flow to the gut is restricted this relative gut hypo perfusion and when that happens it means the gut's going to empty far more slowly so anything that you eat is finally in the early stage of the race but later on anything that you eat it's going to sit and stew in the stomach and it's not going to empty as quickly so you can keep eating your two to four hundred calories per hour there's a good chance it's just going to sit in the stomach and you're going to get this back up and it's going to make you feel sick the other mechanism that's that's very important to mention is is something that we call leaky gut syndrome this is when there's a there's damage to the intestinal border we get a leakage of lipopolysaccharides or endotoxins into the blood and and this in itself can cause feelings of sickness and and upper GI distress stress so when these things happen then all you can really do is is to slow your running pace and or ease your calorie intake if you try and if you try and maintain your running pace then you're going to need to maintain your calorie intake and that's not that's unlikely to be possible that something has to give there yeah particularly if it's if your GI distress is related to one of these latter mechanisms so the advice that we give in the paper is to is to either slow your running pace

or to ease your calorie intake for a short period of time or both and don't forget if you if you reduce your calorie intake there's only a certain period of time that you can can that you can continue with the same work rate but sooner or later something's going to have to give i love the way that you position that because i was trying i was trying to bait you a little bit into some of the you know butterscotch candies and ginger chews and stuff like that which we all turn to and those are fine and i i think that those those are throwing stuff against the wall types of strategies that maybe they work maybe they don't there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from runners around there for years that will swear by this that or the other but your heavy hitter and the whole equation is to just slow down reduce the output that you're asking of your body perhaps get some of the redistribution of blood flow back into your GI system and see if that you can clear it out there and then the other piece of that advice that the paper didn't go over and i and this is just something this is just a practical thing is to especially in hot environments is to cool off because you're also sending blood to the surface of your skin to try to cool and then the whole prioritization of things your body's going to say yeah i'm going to stay cool versus digesting this food and therefore we're going to send blood to the surface of the skin in order to help that help that cooling process and so very first right off the bat whenever we have athletes

that are encountering GI distress during a race it's slow down and cool off let's do that first then because those are going to be the heavy hitters those are going to be the all-stars now let's try any of the other things that you can that you've heard and that you've you know that that you kind of pulled out from the old wives tales of marathoners of years of of years past but if you're doing it in the opposite order that's where i think things can start to go awry because you're just prolonging this GI agony that you've gotten yourself in yeah and exactly as you've said one of you know being dehydrated can cause feelings of sickness and and uh and to intersperse some you know some of my own practical experience with the heavy science in this hundred miler i did the previous year it got very very hot during the day got well up above 30 degrees celsius so what's that um night this one of above 90 fahrenheit and uh i i got to a place where i was feeling very very nauseated about 60 65 miles into the race it was very hot i was feeling super sick wasn't eating wasn't drinking and that was very much a fork in the road moment that was make or break and because i have the experience and i also have an understanding of the the mechanisms that underpin those sensations i knew as you said i needed to get in the shade i needed to stop running and i needed to get some fluids because you you can't

start to address some of the bigger problems unless you you fix the basic stuff but forget about you know ginger and turmeric and all of the other you know old wives tales that you want to throw into the equation i'll tell you what humans love to have simple solutions to complex problems and we we would sooner go after a clever supplement or a or a magic herb or a clever little gadget to fix the symptoms of something than actually go back to basics and and try and get to the root cause of the problem because buying the ginger or or taking a special supplement is easy throw a bit of money at the problem you swallow the thing whole and it and it fit it fixes all your problems but to actually go back and to think okay how much fluid have i been taking in what have i been eating is my carbohydrate too concentrated is my work rate too high this is all very complicated and you know it takes a little bit of effort but these are the these are the heavy hitters these are the things you've got to think about first yep i love the way to i love the way to think about that like think about the heavy hitters first if you do get into a spot of bother i'll use a uk term british term there if you get into a spot of bother i will spare everybody with the my terrible dialect that i could come up with if you get into a spot of bother pick the heavy hitters first slow down cool off and then if you want to lay out layer on any other stuff great but don't do it don't do it despite the big heavy hitters because those could

really pull you out of a pull people are reluctant to slow down particularly if they're on for a certain time or they want a podium yeah i think if i slow down then i'm going to be giving up valuable minutes but actually in the long term it's going to serve you better uh particularly you know if if it's the difference between slowing down and finishing or continue to push the pace in hot conditions and flake out at mile 80 you know you've got to think about what's best for your performance here well but also i bring this up to my athletes a lot the time that you spend slowing down or regrouping in an aid station it doesn't evaporate sure we would love to like fly through all the aid stations and have nothing happen and things like that but if you take the time during an ultra and slow down by a minute per mile or 90 seconds per mile for 10 kilometers or something like that that that time that you've lost doesn't kind of go into thin air because you then have more resources that you can apply later on down the line you might be able and you should be able to run faster a little bit uh a little bit later down the line and we all know this from interval training right this is why we do interval training as we break up work into smaller sections and we can handle higher intensity it's the same thing when we're troubleshooting things out on the trails as we get caught up in the oh my gosh i can't spend the next you know 30 seconds or two minutes or five minutes bringing my intensity down because i've then lost that equal amount of time it's a one for one loss

the reality is is you get not all of it but you get some of it back on the back end of that because you've just gone easier and you've been able to regroup yeah and and it's not to say that there aren't nutritional causes of gi distress you know if you if you consume carbohydrates that are too concentrated or uh or if you consume too too many calories in one go and it's going to be difficult to digest all of these things can cause gi distress but these are things that you should have addressed hopefully earlier on and uh and figured out throughout the course of your training the things that you can't predict to a certain extent is to what extent your gut is going to shut down during a race because of the environmental conditions yep yep okay let's move on the so the very last part of the paper and you're you're going to hate me for this because i know you probably spent a whole lot of time on it i'm going to ask you to summarize it as quickly as possible we're running on a three-hour podcast at this point which is fine it's awesome but the last is not not unusual to me so no i know no it's great i i mean you know we we the listeners won't know this but we'll explain it now we've spent a lot of emails back and forth trying to get this thing just off the ground with the covet 19 pandemic we were supposed to meet in person and then that kind of fell through and then you know you can't even come back to the united states so we've like settled on we're going to do this remotely so maybe i'm just taking advantage of the opportunity here now and keeping you for as long as possible but there's a

good section there's several good sections at the end that cover supplements and other things that you can uh that that ultra marathoners have have been known to take in and it ranges from caffeine to medium chain triglycerides and when i saw that i'm like oh my gosh it's taken back to like triathlon in the 1990s it was really big mcts were really big back then mcts ketone esters vitamins and minerals and you even get into l-glutamine and some uh NSAIDs some uh analgesics and uh anti-inflammatories why don't we try to take like a big rocks approach to that entire section what are what are the what are the bigger things that are going to have an impact in an athlete's race performance out of that whole scope of things and then what are some of the things that athletes may need to actually avoid because there are negative outcomes uh for taking them in so when when i originally wrote wrote the the first draft of the paper that section contained paragraphs on caffeine protein and analgesics and and NSAIDs but you know we we talk about how NSAIDs are really absolutely shouldn't take NSAIDs because they they're overstressed the renal system can cause a lot of can cause kidney dysfunction particularly on a renal system which is overloaded during ultramarathon anyway so we we cannot stress strongly enough how important it is to avoid non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs during an ultramarathon but initially the only

things that i spoke about were caffeine protein and painkillers because none of the other things really there's there's no research to really support the use of medium chain triglycerides uh you shouldn't really need uh antioxidants and things like this um especially if you're eating normal food so i'll i'll just pick out the the sort of the evidence base the uh the data driven stuff and touch upon each of them briefly so so caffeine we know is a very powerful stimulant it's been shown in all these in a number of different sports to have very potent performance enhancing effects through a couple of different mechanisms the main one in ultramarathon is is the stimulant properties of caffeine so if you're if you're competing in a very long duration ultra that's requiring you to run a night stage you know so you're running for more than 12 hours and you're going to be running in the dark then caffeine can if taken in very small doses can prove to be quite beneficial to your performance uh all i can say here is is just read the paper before you start i don't want you to okay well nick tiller said on the podcast i should take caffeine therefore uh i all of my recommendations are on the caveat of read the recommendations in the paper because we thought long and hard about how to make those recommendations with a whole bunch of different caveats depends on how habituated you are to caffeine how sensitive you are to caffeine if you take too much of it it can have very serious and very

harmful side effects so be very very conservative with your caffeine intake but the chances are uh you'll already know if you're sensitive to caffeine and you'll you know if you're if you're going to use caffeine you'll have used it before now so that's the first thing to mention uh the the second thing is protein supplements may be necessary if you're not getting an adequate source of protein through your food and again this is dependent on whether you are consuming foods solely from checkpoints if you're taking your own food but using protein supplements might be an effective way to ensure you're meeting your protein requirements that's sort of 20 grams every three to four hours should be in a rough target and supplementing with leucine or amino acids might be a valid means of of uh of of getting those meeting those targets the only other thing to touch upon very briefly and it goes back to what i was saying about non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs n-seds while n-seds should absolutely be avoided there might be some instances where athletes will opt to take analgesics to painkillers and they're not really considered performance enhancing it's more performance enabling because it can mask symptoms of pain and and discomfort but again read the paper because we stress very clearly that symptom masking can get you into a whole lot of problem as well if you're experiencing pain in the body it's a reason you're experiencing pain it's because something's

not quite right so if you're using painkillers to mask those symptoms particularly in a long duration ultra that can get you into trouble but um you know i'm not going to patronize some very experienced ultra marathon runners who might be listening who have probably been using painkillers for years but just think very carefully about your motives for taking them the reasons why you might take them and uh you know if you're going to do it do it very conservatively with all of the aforementioned caveats so i take a little bit more of a hardline approach with n-seds and if i find them in my athletes drop bags i'll just throw them away because i don't want it i'm i don't i don't want it on my conscious um i do i do know athletes still continue to use them despite all the warnings but i do i i like the way that you position this in the paper is that they're not performance enhancing enhancing but they may be performance enabling i always take it as a one up 10 down you might use your vocabulary you might be able to enable performance by just a smidge more by masking pain but the 10 down is you could die you could get thrown in the hospital with an acute kidney injury renal failure and you could either have severe lifelong consequences because of that or you could actually die so i don't think that that's a i don't think that that's a good risk reward proposition at all you know we know the ultramarathon ultra endurance exercise puts additional strain on the renal system and n-seds do exactly the same thing

they cause all sorts of renal cardiovascular gastrointestinal problems there is the suggestion it can also inhibit the absorption of sodium through the gut cause all sorts of health problems i think it's worth uh distinguishing between analgesics and n-seds so while n-seds are absolutely should be prohibited because of all of these potential side effects painkillers so normal analgesics so um you know tylenol or in the uk it's paracetamol these these are a little bit more forgivable i still wouldn't advocate them because masking pain can have implications of of its own but um but the n says that there's no way that that that could be justified under any circumstance all right man weird this you win nick so if i had a prize for coolest longest whatever podcast you get it we knew it was going to be that way from the get-go man i i like i said i really like your paper um i've you know read it i've written a summary article for our lay audience uh on this paper what would that be considered it's like a position stand of the position stand or something like that a summary of the position stand a bridged version oh man but i can't i can't do it justice but i hope we did it justice for the last three hours of this podcast it is a really incredible piece of work i do hope that we continue to to get to read more from you on the physiology side as you alluded to earlier that's

going to be fascinating i had no idea that might be coming down the pipes i will eagerly look forward to uh reading that um before we let you go what are the big nuggets man like this is a lot to digest all pun intended um but there are some things that i think we can kind of summarize into the last couple minutes of this uh podcast as it pertains to the nutrition for i'm going to use the title nutrition considerations for single stage ultra marathon training and racing what are the big takeaways i guess if you want uh a super condensed version then you know we start the abstract of the paper has 10 points that we kind of summarize all the different sections so you know i'd uh if if listeners are not going to go and read the paper for themselves i'd suggest reading your summary because you did a you did a fantastic job of covering all of the important points um in a much more kind of uh uh digestible fashion um if if that's too much for you then then read the 10 point summary on the in the abstract of the paper but i guess to boil it down you know i think in ultra marathon more than any other sport perhaps we've got to do what we can to assimilate the scientific arguments and learn as much as we can from the scientific research that's being done because there's a lot of it now coming out some really good some really good work but also to integrate that with you know the applied approach and individualization because

every athlete is different particularly in ultra i can't stress this enough there are so many unknowns and that the body can respond in so many unusual unexpected ways during any given ultra so it's about listening to your body knowing your body and getting some experience as well but being open-minded to both the science and the applied approach and trying to integrate them as much as you can i'd say that for me if you boil it down that's kind of the the take-home message yeah that's beautiful perfect we we're gonna have uh obviously a link to the paper in the show notes but we'll also have links to where to find you and where to find some of the other associated research that we uh pulled out uh in this particular podcast where can people find you and find some of the work that you're doing either on social media or on the web yeah so you can uh find out more about the work i'm doing at uh nbtiller.com that's my website there's um everything you need to know is on there or you can follow me on twitter at nbtiller and i tweet about science and critical thinking and ultramarathon and all the stuff i'm interested in awesome man well i hope the listeners uh check it out this is a you've just been an incredible resource here i always appreciate it when researchers in the field that also have a little bit of skin in the game like you do being an ultra marathon yourself can combine these research and these practical things to down to the level of the athlete because that is that that's a skill that not everybody has and it's actually the one that's the

most practical for people so really appreciate your work thank you for what you do i'm sure we'll have you on for another five hour episode of the podcast we'll have to bring in a few uh carbohydrate supplements to just to get through that one but appreciate your time man well we'll have to go for the record next time but i had a great time so thanks for having me and there you have it folks holy cow that was epic i hope everybody got a tremendous amount out of that podcast with my friend nick tiller i hope he makes his way back to the states here sooner rather than later and we can share a beer and share a run together and talk more about nutrition if you guys cannot tell by listening he is extremely passionate and enthusiastic about this being a trail runner himself and i think it's awesome that we have those types of people in the space that can do the research side but also can practice what they preach out there on the trails so thank you to nick all of the research that we referenced in this particular episode or in the show notes if you want to do a deeper dive into that go ahead and check it out all the links to find nick are also in the show notes if you want to go and follow him go ahead and check the show notes out thank you again to michael carson for all the editing and post-production work that you do on this podcast thank you to the listeners appreciate the heck out of all of you if you have not had the time or the chance

head on over to itunes give this podcast a rating or a review helps the podcast out a tremendous amount we will see you guys out on the trails eventually until then stay safe stay healthy keep training people enjoy yourselves we will see you on the other side