Training for Altitude and the Heat with Exercise Physiologist Lindsay Golich | Koopcast Episode 42

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is all about training and racing at altitude and training and racing in the heat and how to leverage those two conditions to improve your performance on the podcast today i have the incredible lindsey gollich lindsey and i have known each other for many many years going back to our intern days when we're first getting our teeth cut working with endurance athletes and now lindsey is an exercise physiologist at the high altitude and environmental training center and athlete performance lab at the olympic training center in colorado springs colorado on a daily basis lindsey is advising the best athletes and the best coaches on how to get prepared for altitude and for the heat i had a lot of fun with this conversation every single conversation i have with lindsey is a hoot we always go back to our coaching roots and we always go back to what is best for the athletes that are preparing for these types of events so let's get right into it here's my conversation with lindsey gollich first off the high altitude and environmental training center and athlete performance lab

do you have to say that every time you introduce yourself um no so um randy wilber who's one of our senior physiologists he came up with the acronym hatzy for high altitude training center um and that came from uh some of our earlier physiologists you mentioned like jt kearney and a few others people that have had been there where they started doing you know this live high train low experimentation you know many many years ago um and it really was the evolution of training at altitude and how it all works so uh we call it the hatzy and i always joke too because i always when i say to a lot of people high altitude they think we're always going up in altitude and i would say you know 90 of what we do is we actually bring the room down to sea level since we are at altitude um rather than it going up in elevation we're always bringing it down um and then our athlete performance lab yeah it's just you know there's a it's a mouthful but there's a lot that goes on in there um so uh there's no good acronym for that it's just a mouthful lindsey i'm just i'm just giving you some we've got a lot of acronyms so well maybe we won't we won't add to that so but before we go any further let's like get kind of like a physical description of like your neck of the woods with the high out the hatzy and the athlete performance lab like give the listeners a little bit of a scope of like what the room is like and what the like the tools and the you know all the different toys that

you have to like test the athletes and things like that sure so our hatzy we're located in the area called sport sciences at the olympic and paralympic training center in colorado springs and in sport sciences it's not just exercise physiology or sport physiology we also have dietetics we have psychology and technology in there um so there's a few of us that share that space and the nice thing is in our environmental room and also in the athlete performance lab we're able to have that shared space and be doing multiple different things depending on what sport group is in there um but in our high altitude training center the hatzy um it's about a 900 square foot room and in that room we can change three environmental conditions we can change the altitude we can change the temperature and we can change the humidity so really with altitude we can go down to sea level we can go up to about 23 24 000 feet um the temperature we can go to negative five fahrenheit and then we can also go to about 115 to 120 degrees fahrenheit uh humidity we can get to single digits humidity and then 100 humidity um so really the the objective there is that we can match any training and competition environment in the world that athletes are preparing for and and that even goes for winter sports we've had quite a few winter sport athletes come in for equipment testing or even just uh testing of different uh training

conditions as well um obviously we can't get to negative temperatures but where you look at a lot of the winter olympics have been held over the last uh few cycles it hasn't been in very very extreme cold locations and i remember when um the rio olympics were coming around and you and i were having this conversation a lot of what you were doing there were it was kind of like worst case scenario types of testing with the athletes you bring the athletes in and say okay based on the historical patterns of rio this is about how hot and how humid it's going to get let's put you on a treadmill let's put you on a cycling ergometer and see what see just see how you react to that environment in a little bit of an educational lesson for the coach or for the coach and or sorry for the athlete or for the coach and the athlete yeah and and i would say we were lucky that we had the room we officially opened up the room in 2015 um with plenty of time to get ready for the rio olympics and we were able to target track and field our marathon our distance team triathlon and cycling were the three sports that we really put the emphasis into so post rio and getting ready for tokyo we've really been able to expand that to quite a few other athletes and not just our traditional endurance aerobic type of athletes but yet we've done all our triathletes all recyclists quite a few of our distance runners we've now had all our boxing athletes um a lot of our wrestling athletes um almost a lot of our paralympic programming uh that is a resident program for triathlon cycling track and field as well come

through um so we're doing the same thing is that we can say hey here's the conditions of tokyo and they are going to be extreme so tokyo is going to be one of the hottest uh olympics that we've had to date it has a potential to be there um delaying it a year doesn't change anything the dates are exactly the same from 2020 to 2021 just one year later um so we'll put athletes in the environment of their competition of what we anticipate it to be um and or we can go to what the extreme might be and then we can see how their performance is impacted um and so what we've done or what i've done quite a bit of is what i've called our heat stress testing so you know we we set the athlete up to fail basically so i want them to reach a point of failure um because then it gives me an idea of what they can tolerate and then we can then work with their coaching nutrition anyone else on their performance team and work backwards of saying well we know this is a limitation so how can we minimize or delay the onset to that point um or what can we do differently in training so we don't reach that point at all um and i feel like we've been really impactful with a lot of our athletes to better understanding that you know simple things like in a marathon running race um you could go out really hard in that first 10k but what is that cost over that last 5k of the race you know if your internal core temperature just uh gets too hot too quickly can you actually begin to limit it or bring it back

down and so we've been able to really pinpoint what that means for each athlete in different pacing strategies and nutritional strategies and hydrational strategies as well and what do you consider the point of failure like i think this might get into some of the ways that you're actually monitoring the athletes so you're having them go hard in a hot environment but like paint that picture a little bit more for the listeners to like let them know like how hard and how hot these athletes are having to train in yeah so pretty much for our heat stress testing we have three points of failure um the first one is if your internal core temperature exceeds 104 degrees fahrenheit um or about 42 degrees celsius is our cutoff that's freaking hot yeah that's really hot that's really normally if you you know if you're if you have a child and they have a temperature of 102 you're you're going to you know the hospital or the er right that's you know put them in a cold bath so we have a core temperature of 104 um we'll set a timeline like a time limit based upon the athlete of saying like it could be a 60 minute test 70 90 minute test it just depends on on what uh demographic is in there um or if the athlete can't physically go anymore so we've had people pass out we've had people get sick um people just say they just can't take another step you know so there's a little bit of everything and all three situations or scenarios happen all the time and you know i've had the same athlete come in multiple times and we've had the three different scenarios happen three different times um and that's also a learning curve uh we had an athlete that came to us and we were figuring

out uh traveling across multiple time zones so they had actually just returned from being a competition in asia and they were testing with me two days later so what did that uh additional stress of travel do on their core temperature regulation and for that athlete it was worse so you know it's helping us figure out how close to a competition date can we arrive to our point of you know our destination point um and obviously two days is too short and we knew that in advance but we're really trying to test the limits of saying if i'm having to chase points all over the world you know do i need to be there two days before five days before seven days before so um you know we can see different things happen for different reasons and in the same athlete even if their fitness is really high so you you've got these athletes you put them into a really hot really stressful environment you take them to the point of failure and then you're working with them and their team their coach their nutritionist and things like that and saying okay here's where the athlete was failing here's why they were failing here are some different interventions that we might want to try to alleviate this point of failure i know that all of those and you you and i are going to be really like-minded on that is where it's very individualized because the conditions are different the athlete is different they're coming from a different time zone where they failed why they failed all that other stuff but for the listeners out there are there any broad brush strokes in terms of the interventions that you apply in those scenarios where the athlete gets over hot they can't take another step they puke they're

doing all these other things are there any like common things to like pull out of that yeah for sure there are i mean i think the number one thing is going into an extreme environment whether it be heat humidity altitude you want to be as fit as you can be so that's like general goal number one um so if you have a race a running race or triathlon race and it's you know somewhere in the south in the u.s or you're traveling to a different country um for a competition you just want to make sure your fitness is high that will help you one tolerate those extreme conditions better um the second one is hydration is really important you know we hear a lot about don't drink too much or drink you're not drinking enough or you're drinking you know everything is in between um but ultimately uh super easy you can do pre and post body weight and figure out what your sweat rate is and then you're trying to hydrate accordingly you don't need to come out even at the end but you're trying to minimize your losses so we're trying to minimize uh you know uh a weight loss if you have a one day event we don't really want it to exceed at the extreme end six to ten percent uh a lot of literature out there says two to three percent and i agree with that in a training perspective of if i have multiple training sessions a day or i'm doing multiple races back to back days but if you have like a one day uh let's say you're doing a marathon and it's one marathon and that's it and you have nothing else um before or after it you could probably get away with a little bit uh higher rate of dehydration if you're prepared for it

meaning that you've trained in those situations you're not intentionally trying to become extremely dehydrated but it shouldn't impact your performance drastically so none of the cycling strategies where they're intentionally trying to dehydrate before the bottom of the climb in order to lose a little bit away is that what you're saying is that what you're referring to so the listeners will remember a podcast that i did which one is this with uh stavros cavaros lindsay i'm sure you're familiar with his work where we we went through a little bit of that uh a little bit of that uh dehydration research so they'll get it they'll get a chuckle out of it so yeah so you're telling me at hatsy like with all this fancy stuff that you have you've got core temperature monitors you've got you know a room that can simulate almost any reasonable athletic condition possible all the different stuff that you can put in there ergometers treadmills you kind of name it it's coming down to the preventative measures of the common preventative measures are fitness and hydration yeah and i would say tolerance of heat is almost 100 preventative measures you know during a competition you're trying to hydrate throughout or consume calories throughout but that becomes individualized of how much you actually need and you know i think a lot of the literature out there in how your body responds to heat and humidity over the last 10 20 years it's not telling us anything drastically new that we don't know as scientists sport scientists the the way that i see the best utilization of the room these core

temperature devices all the other technologies that athletes can wear and giving us real-time biometrics as we're as they're doing their training helps to educate the athlete and the coach on what's actually happening internally an athlete can really identify what's happening but sometimes they're not good at verbalizing that to a coach so coach can't understand you know all of a sudden an athlete looks great you know at an elite level an elite runner when they're running at 100 percent uh they look great when they look when they're running at 90 percent they actually still look really good um it's not like me when i go out and run and i get tired you can tell the difference but as our professional athletes their efficiency and economy of running is so high it's hard to identify that but we can actually see that what's taking place and it becomes a greater education of the impact of what that means on performance so a lot of what you're doing you're like educating the athletes and their coaches and their support staff on what's going on i'm always curious to know with with like professionals like yourself lindsey because you you are a coach i mean you and i have a coaching relationship that goes back where we were colleagues for she's 15 years now yeah it's a long time and you're and you're a darn good coach like how does it work with you working with other athletes and other coaches like putting on the testing hat and then taking off the testing hat and then having to put the coaching hat on like how like like what how does that dynamic work where you're working with other athletes that have other coaches and you have to provide counsel to both

athletes yeah i mean i i think it can be tricky because sometimes i think you know i can see the numbers and i can see what's happening but then i don't actually know you know what's happening on a day-to-day basis with that athlete and their coach relationship right so i get a a snippet of what's happening and i have very objective data that i can quantify and i can provide feedback um for some athletes i see day-to-day and uh we have a little bit easier conversations with those athletes and coaches um there's a term i heard on a podcast a few years ago saying like you become a translational physiologist so my goal is to capture the data and work on a better way to translate that data of information to coaching an athlete so you know i i can say like you know this is your number but that may not mean anything so you have to come across a little bit as a coach right to understand to have that uh background of saying okay here's how we're actually going to apply it on our day-to-day basis or for a competition because if i just say like it has to be x and the coach looks at me it's like you're crazy that's never going to happen then that's not helpful either i love that translational physiologist let's let's pull on that a little bit because as you said from the onset there's three things that you can manipulate right you can manipulate the heat the humidity and we're going to combine those into the just heat environment right and you can manipulate the altitude as well since tokyo is going to be the hot probably going to be the hottest olympics on record

let's and it's hot right now in colorado springs and all over the country with fires are burning and everything else um heat's going to be the most pertinent so what can athletes do aside from getting or actually let me pose this question a little bit differently what are we going to see at the tokyo olympics because all of the ngbs and all the support staff and people like yourself they're all and they already have because tokyo was supposed to happen they've already like put their thinking caps on and said okay how are we going to get the athletes ready for the race walk event the marathon events the track and field events cycling events all these things that are in these hot environments we're not going to get to see that until next year but you probably can guess what's going to happen in terms of the different interventions that come out what are we going to see yeah i mean i think hopefully we don't see anything different than we've seen in many other uh olympics at least from the u.s i can say the u.s is that we're going in really well prepared um we're fortunate that um almost all of our sports have the ability to complete a test event in tokyo um so when they had the opportunity to travel there they had the opportunity to compete in a similar type of environmental condition so for triathlon their test event was one exactly one year prior to the date that they would be competing in the olympic games so we had a really good perspective of what the conditions are going to be like and what could obstacles could be thrown at us um and what we need to do to be better prepared

and i feel like looking at that event as an example is that not just the u.s but a lot of the other countries had done a good job of their homework and what they needed to provide their athletes and coaches with to be prepared for competition so i think the the main things which is no surprise the use of ice vests um cooling devices has been uh huge um i know there was a huge push for that um actually around the 1996 olympics in atlanta because they're also quite hot and humid and then going into sydney in 2000 um sydney australia those two olympics um there was a big heat push so figuring out cooling vests ice slushy drinks all these different things we're just finding better ways to use those and incorporate them in our day-to-day training so it's less overt i guess um but i think the cooling vests will be the biggest thing um the nice thing uh tokyo has an infrastructure to support this is that they're all the athletes staging prior to competition and immediately after competition has uh cooling a tense you know where they're air conditioned and nice and cool so um i think you know we'll see athletes rather than necessarily like standing out at the finish they'll be kind of whisked away into a cooler environment and doing their interviews in those type of environments um but i think if you weren't really keen on it you might not notice too much um from at least the u.s and i i believe most countries are going to be really well prepared

in these extreme conditions um so hopefully we don't see anything you know too catastrophic from athletes going in really underprepared if if cooling vests is going to be the thing and i always relate this back to the last olympics where cupping was the thing right cupping is the that was the modality that came out of that olympics because all the swimmers who just happened like they're you know they're shirtless and you can kind of see their bodies and you can actually see the cupping marks very prevalent that was the hot modality right after the last olympics so if cooling vests are going to be like the hot modality after this olympics like what is the what is the everyday practical use case for like a normal athlete that's doing when the mass participation events come out come back what's the normal application going to be for those like for those types of athletes that are doing the new york city marathon or triathlon or an ultra marathon or something like that yeah i think if you were to do um your triathlon's kind of funky in like the longer distance races depending on the temperature body of water so for tokyo the water temperature for the triathlon it's actually quite warm it's same with open water swimming um but you know even athletes if you look at the kona um ironman world championships the water temperature is warm but not hot so there's not a high need to use a cooling vest in that type of environment now uh same thing with new york city marathon typically the time of year it's not blazing hot but maybe chicago marathon is a good example is

that there's been a couple years where it's been really hot i would think that you'd see more athletes wearing a cooling vest up to the starting line um or warming up in a cooling vest prior to getting into their corral um before the start of the race as you know trying to lower their core temperature and be better prepared um i think too one thing that i've seen which it's not anything you know super new but i just think i see more and more distance runners and ultra runners uh marathoners running with water now where you know five or six years ago i think like the ultra running community was the only community you'd see like running around with like you know water bottles and different things and now i feel like everybody in my neighborhood has a water bottle in their hand so i think there's just some general education that's getting passed down of understanding you know i can run with a bottle on even my 15 mile run i don't have to wait till i get to my 20 plus mile run to now i have to carry my water with me i can see a lot of people also like diying their own cooling vests with just cold towels cold towels and ice which is perfectly i mean that's just as effective or can be just as effective yeah and i mean those are strategies like we we've partnered with nike and they have this really neat cooling vest that we came up with as a design for tokyo um i believe you can purchase it now you know they were waiting till the olympics but i think they're probably out for distribution now um but before that and even using those there's times when yeah we still have a ziploc bag full of ice

that we're handing out to athletes a cold towel dumped in a bucket of ice or even cold water if we can't get ice you know those are strategies even though when we have all the great latest and greatest technologies there's locations and places that we go to that all of a sudden nothing work you can't find freezers to freeze your cooling vests but you have ice machine um so you do your best um we've also found that like using misters if you're just sitting around can really help with the fan so if you have a big a fan and misting that can really help to lower the temperature of a space by quite a bit which then helps you to better uh thermoregulate just that environmental heat so can you describe like how much of a difference that would make either in your lab because that's that's a lot of what you do is just a b testing you bring the person in the lab here's the environment just go run we'll see where you fail okay we'll do the ice vest intervention or cooling vest intervention we'll see how much of a difference that makes can you broadly like paint the picture of how much of a difference does it make in a hot environment to use some sort of cooling intervention yeah so you know i'm fortunate that i've got access to all this and that even athletes you know we'll do testing in our lab and then we'll have testing out in the field and then we can even do real life testing in competition so these core temperature pills athletes will swallow during an event and we'll see did we do it all right or where did we fall short um but what we've seen is by adding in these interventions of better hydration the timing of hydration um using cooling devices uh you know

cooling vest or warm-up strategy in a cold environment meaning air-conditioned room rather than you know being outside um those type of things we've been able to see a delay of the onset of their threshold of that internal core temperature by up to about six percent so that's a pretty significant shift over the course of a 10k so if we just look at a triathlon for example so six percent is all the difference of getting on the podium and being like 15th in a race um and uh that can be from the run or the bike and a lot of that it allows for the athlete to make better decisions because they're not uh overheating or at their perception of the environment isn't as high so their reaction times are better so on the bike they can hopefully you know make the break if that's happening or avoid crashes or different things that could be catastrophic um and allow again that six percent even if it's one percent for some athletes that's a significant gain because we're not trying to change their training which is the hard part you know you're not trying to do more training or less training or higher intervals we're just train changing some of the strategies around your training and if we can get get one out of it it's a significant gain in overall performance and literally what you'd be talking about is is warming up in a cool environment or warming up with the cooling vest on as like a basic intervention to get this delayed onset of their of their core temperature increasing yeah exactly

simple intervention yeah simple i mean a lot of times i mean a lot of times we think about like these really complex ways of you know the you remember the cooling glove back in what was that like the early 2000s when they were testing that out on a cycling ergometer and so for for the i'll post the in the show notes for the listeners i'll post a link to this this device which creates a negative pressure environment around your hand and circulates cold water uh specifically on the palm of your hand it's supposed to cool you off great it works but it's too complicated in an athletic environment to make much of a difference there's some applications for it but it's too complicated for most athletic uh so what we're talking about with the cooling vest is like literally just slapping some cold water in a towel and warming up that way yeah yeah and and again you're trying to figure out you know what you have access to and yes there you can make it really complicated but at the end of the day it's not reality so it's just like you know maybe your pre-race workout depending on what time of day your race competition happens you're running on the treadmill inside in the air-conditioned room instead of running for that 20 or 30 minutes outside so you're just minimizing the overall stress from the morning and everything else before you get to the starting line of your event okay i'm going to pivot a little bit and ask a kind of a crazy question about the heat before we go to altitude you get to see all these types of athletes at the beginning it was just the endurance athletes but now it looks like you've got some of the combat sport athletes and maybe even some of

the team sport athletes as well yeah which one of those athletes like handle the hot environments the best and why do you think that is yeah i have not seen a specific rhyme or reason i know there's some theories out there but what i again what i've seen there's so many other factors that go into it is that uh like i've had one athlete who can handle the heat in competition really well but when we included travel it all fell apart um that same athlete came in one time and they were sick they had a cold and it all fell apart so there's so many different factors that you know really impact um i think there probably is something greater to it but it's beyond my thing if there's some genetic you know predisposition again there are theories out there on it but i have not seen it actually work at an elite level of being like extremely true one way or another um i just think overall preparation of doing all the right things that we said like eating well hydrating well being rested you know coming showing up to the start and lying ready to go and being relaxed about the situation so not super high stress also makes a big difference um in the overall outcome of how you're going to adapt and respond to the heat nobody can see this this is a failure of audio but lindsey and i are kind of like chuckling as we're as we're going through this conversation because we've probably had it a hundred times as it just comes down to fitness you know yeah and it's a similar thing as you're saying to altitude right i know probably getting a little ahead of ourselves but you know

you have extreme mountain climbers that have climbed and summoned at everest and they've done it once or twice and on the third time then they get altitude sickness yeah you know so there's different reasons why and each of them they can go back and kind of have an idea of why maybe they had a cold or they were not as well going into that final peak or their their uh summit to the top or whatever it might be right so there's there's just things physiologically that if we're we're trying to minimize the um risk i guess right of what we know is can hurt performance okay so let's go to altitude sure so you've got this room and i'm sure i'm sure a lot of the listeners out there and even some of your athletes when they find out that they've got this tool available to them that can go up to 22 000 feet so she said 22 000 feet they're going to be like put me at that like give me that give me that dose that's what i want i want to train at altitude i've heard all this awesome stuff about training high and training at altitude that's what's going to make all my red blood cells go bananas and i'm going to get super fit just by being exposed to this environment but as you mentioned at the very beginning most times you're bringing the altitude down from our 6 000 foot you know living space here in colorado springs why is that the case yeah i mean one we're trying to be prepared for the events that our athletes are traveling to so in the olympic format there's really very little to very few events i guess that

even take place at altitude there's a couple mountain bike races a year that are at a moderate altitude or altitude but they don't exceed 10 000 feet and then you think okay well skiing that might be an event but even when you look at their world cup circuit the highest mountain that they're going to is here in colorado when they're at breckenridge or beaver creek a lot of the other mountains in europe they're very high but they're starting at sea level where colorado we're starting at you know six seven thousand feet of vertical so we're not at extreme altitudes very much within sport so we don't need to prepare for that and when we go through a lot of the scientific literature of training there hasn't been anything to show at a elite level of extreme altitude preparation meaning training high very high so higher than colorado springs or higher than our 10 000 foot mark that allows for increased performance for endurance athletes so what we've actually seen is that it can hinder performance so we're limited as we go up the mountain so to speak our ability to perform decreases whether it's at a threshold or a vo2 at a high intensity or anaerobic level um and so really in training we're trying not to do that we want athletes to you know not decrease their ability to do more work we want them to do more work um so really going high is not really in an ideal situation for most athletes it's interesting to see

like just the way that that has the way that this this altitude thing has perpetuated over the course of you know the last couple of decades because it used to be almost de facto where any endurance athlete or any team they would always do an altitude camp and it's and it means it's still prevalent but it's becoming less and less so because at least in my observation i want to hear your take on this as well but at least in my observation we're noticing kind of like two things is one you do see people's decreased capacity to do work and sometimes they get worse after the altitude camp or the altitude exposure or however you're doing their training at altitude their limiting altitude or some some combination of both of those and then the the the second thing is is we're starting to realize that the camps themselves because it's such an isolated environment that's what creates this super compensation this really positive benefit is because they've gotten rid of all of the distractions and all they can focus on is training it's not the altitude it's the other it's like all the other things that are kind of like wrapped around the the quote-unquote camp i don't know if you've noticed that in your dealings with athletes as well though i mean i think it's depends on what sport group so for a lot of our track and field athletes are distance athletes so athletes that are 5k 10k marathon they we actually do quite a bit of altitude training so whether we have a group that lives and trains

here in colorado springs we have quite a few groups that come out to woodland parks that's right around 8 500 feet but we don't go above that we know that once we start going higher than that 8 500 foot mark for living at altitude performance decreases and we do the same thing with our triathlon groups and cycling groups we have quite a few cyclists right now that are out here in colorado getting ready for the world road world championships which still have not yet been canceled and they're going to take place in about five weeks um so we're moving forward as is um so we've got a few of our women out here getting ready doing altitude precursor before they head over to europe for racing um but i think it's a combination of things you know again i'm fortunate that i've got the tools and technology to assess an athlete coming to altitude so there's a few factors that we always want to look at prior to coming to altitude is that do you have the um red blood cells and iron in your body to tolerate that initial adaptation that's going to take place so if we come to altitude and we're already at a deficit um for various reasons then we're not going to reap the benefits and i think a lot of athletes don't understand what that looks like so prior to an athlete coming to altitude you know two to four or even six weeks we'll get blood testing done and so if we have to have an intervention of nutritional factors rest and recovery different type of training we'll do so before we come so they

reap those benefits and then once they're at altitude we do blood testing as well and then we also have a testing called total hemoglobin mass so that we can do that i'll do at the training center where we're measuring the hemoglobin which is a part of the blood that carries all those oxygen molecules which is part of the iron and things that help to transport oxygen throughout the body um that we can see is an athlete are they gaining are they acclimatizing to altitude or are they actually not acclimatizing and becoming more fatigued and then we have to go back is it the altitude or is it the training prescription right with the coach and the intensity or is it being prescribed correctly and the athletes not executing it correctly so then we have to kind of go through those factors as well to figure out where did we make the mistake um but we've been able to see you know with athletes and doing it correctly um up to like a three to four percent gain in hemoglobin mass which is uh uh your ability to produce more red blood cells and if we're doing that that is helpful now that doesn't translate to a three or four percent gain in performance but it helps your ability to perform and to do to do more work so so when you have the athletes that are coming up to the woodland park scenario and to describe that a little bit further woodland park's a town that's uh that's higher than colorado springs it's just west of colorado springs it's it's about 8 500 feet and that's where the athletes would reside somewhere

around that altitude and they come down to 6 000 or 6 500 feet in colorado springs and actually do their training you're doing a blood panel on those athletes before they come out to that type of training camp what are the things specifically that you're looking for in that blood panel to say okay you're a good candidate and you're not yeah i mean i think the simple ones are like your red blood cell count and your hematocrit um and your hemoglobin so the the really basic um blood markers then we start looking at the iron levels so what are their iron levels what are their ferritin levels which is a stored iron in your body which helps to uh carry those oxygen molecules again uh throughout the body for ability to do more work and to help produce more red blood cells so if we have certain athletes and their ferritin values that stored iron is below a certain mark and it's a little bit different for each uh demographic of athlete um then we say you're actually not coming out to altitude until we can get the number up high enough um because when you can't do the training that you need to and recover from it effectively at altitude so it becomes uh a waste of time and then you know you don't want to lose weeks on training because of just going to where your team is or what you thought was a good a good idea um but i do agree with you i mean i think you know similar what we're talking before the podcast started is like with all these professional sports they're going to these isolated environments and

they can really focus on their sport and their team when a lot of athletes go to a quote-unquote altitude training camp it's the same concept they're either going to a rented house or a hotel and it's really a period of time that's focused around training and recovery so we're trying to minimize additional life stresses of you know potentially family friends your local environment you're just focusing on training good nutrition hydration and recovery and and i think you know when you get all that right then really good things can happen out of it yeah but people think they because it's called an altitude camp they're like oh i got better at the altitude camp and then that's how that word spreads right well it's the altitude camp must be the altitude that made you better sometimes it's not always the case sometimes it's altitude but usually as we know right performance and improvement is always multifactorial yeah um yeah i want to dig a little bit into so the blood work that you do in advance of the athletes coming to altitude you kind of presented this broad array of things that you are looking at and the listeners are going to want to know like what what the answer is and there are a lot of um and the reason i bring this up is because i did i did a previous podcast with sean arnott who is a like a specialist in all these different types of tests but a lot of athletes will either get blood testing from their primary care physician or they'll use a third-party vendor like you know one of the labs or inside tracker or something like that and inevitably what they get is

what their values are in comparison to a reference range and or some sort of stoplight system you know red is bad yellow is you're okay and green is your is good how does that compare to what you are actually doing as a practitioner and looking at what the athlete is coming to the table in terms of their blood values and saying okay you're good to go and you're not yeah so um basically i'll work with our medical team um and if there's a team doctor as well we'll take a look at it and even our dietician so we're all looking at it for different reasons medical is looking at it for overall health you know the dietician is looking at it from a nutritional perspective for supplementation i'll be looking at it from a performance perspective of you know red light green light go to altitude or not or decrease training or we need to do that um i think the what you mentioned earlier is that yes an athlete will go or just a person will go and you get here's your range and that range is just based off the general american population and it's one it's really broad um and two it's not always for athletes um so what we do with athletes over time is that yes you have your recommended range which is just you know the the general recommendations but then we create an athlete specific range but it's not specific it's not athlete specific meaning all track and field 5k runners blood profile should be x it's actually like athlete a here's your profile and here's your highs here's your lows in that range

and where are you relative to your normal so as an example like we have athletes for hemoglobin when we look at it they could be on the normal high side of the the range of your general range but that might mean that it's just a normal number for them so it's not actually high um and then we want to say okay well what do we need to do to like where did we go wrong where it's not normal high when we thought it should actually be higher than it is is it a hydration thing is it you know excessive fatigue and not enough recovery or whatever it might also other factors it could be yeah the the i'm glad you mentioned that lindsey because one of my pet peeves with a lot of the blood testing companies out there is they are always comparing it to the reference ranges and they typically don't do as good of a job as i would like them to do comparing it longitudinally with the athlete which is always what we're doing as a coach we're looking at okay where were you in january where were you in april where were you in september you know whatever the testing frequency type of it whatever the testing frequency is and comparing it to that individual athlete and they could always be green but if you get one number that's like 40 lower than their previous testing value but it's still in the reference range you would look at that and go no this is a problem we got to figure out what's going on here right yeah and i think you know the hard thing with that is that you know how frequently do you want to get blood tests so i would say you know depending if you're if you're healthy a healthy check-in in an ideal situation would be like four times a year once

a quarter um now uh if you have going to altitude for altitude training camps or doing different things you're trying to test things you might get things more frequently so if we have an athlete that comes in with low iron we'll put an intervention together and we'll do another retest about six weeks after maybe four weeks if we're on a time crunch scale to see have they responded to that intervention but at that point we're also not always doing a complete panel of all the other factors we're just looking at um the red your typical cbc your typical blood count and iron panel to say okay the things that we've put in place is the athlete being compliant and are we getting the results that we hope to see happen 100 okay so we we've talked a little bit about an altitude camp right athletes go to altitude to train to get better and you know that works out a lot but a lot of listeners to this podcast when they see the title i haven't made the title up yet it's going to be something like heat and altitude because those are sexy you know title names and it'll draw more people into it but it's also your wheelhouse obviously because we want to talk about it a lot of athletes looking at that will will put themselves in the scenario of oh i'm going to the leadville trail 100 and i live in chicago or i'm pikes peak marathon is this weekend this podcast will come out after the pikes peak marathon but a lot of people from c level in a normal year will come out to the pikes peak marathon they'll be that'll be their first exposure to altitude and they will want to know what do i need to do to get ready for this competition environment that is

at high altitude and now that i'm thinking about it that's probably one of the top three questions that i get asked in any format whether i do a talk at a running store or whether it's on instagram or whatever what do i do what do i do to get ready for the altitude and i give my standard stock answer because i've been i've been asked it so times so many times but with all the tools that you have what would you say to that person who's going to a high altitude environment to compete and they're coming from a sea level environment where they have to train yeah well i hope our answer is going to be pretty similar it goes back to the hydration get as fit as you can before you come out and you either want to come out as close to your day of competition as possible or you have to come out like two to three weeks before to get that climatization and those are the two standard things but you know even here in town i have a handful of running friends that are doing the pikes peak marathon and they go up to the top of pikes peak and they do the three two one standard workout where they run three miles down up three up down two up two down one up one and they do that quite a bit and it takes all day to drive up to the top of the mountain yeah workout and they always say is that good one to do and i said well i think it's good to do because it gives you experience of what the trail looks like at the top of the mountain but it's not necessary from your time management and the fatigue that you get from it that you don't have to train at 14 000 feet to be able to run at 14 000

feet now if you're living there all time yes that's a different factor but if most of these races even in the ultra race you're going up a peak and then you're coming back down so hopefully your time at the at the higher extreme altitudes is minimal in the grand scheme of things and pacing becomes critical to understand your pacing understand your hydration needs your nutritional needs at those altitudes that's really what i think helps when you train at altitude to understand how you have to actually cut back um on your overall uh i guess pacing power you know your overall output of energy at that high altitude this is so boring it's just get fit i know we can rename the title to just get fit to get ready for hot and altitude environments i mean i wish i could say like i wish if i if i wrote a book you know i would try to be selling it but then it'd be like that magic pill of like if you take this it's gonna do everything for you you know at the end of the day you have to go back to the foundation of like tried and true things of just general physiology like you can't overcome that with any type of like magic pill or crazy intervention in a one-off situation i'm so glad that you mentioned the 3-2-1 workout and let me i think this is worth explaining because a lot of people are going to be scratching their heads on it so the pike speak marathon starts in manitou springs which is like 6700 feet it goes to the top of uh pike's peak which is over 14 000 feet and then goes back down it's it's a proper marathon it was actually the first marathon that had a woman in it like way before a boston marathon

not a lot of people know that she just came back for what anniversary was it lindsey of her running i was reading about it on a newsletter somewhere i can't remember um it was like it was either the 50th or the 60th year that she had done it and she got up on the scaffolding like she's you know in her late 80s or early 90s now she got up on the on the scaffolding that was on the you know the start line that's over there in manitou just like a pro i was watching and going oh my gosh that's awesome that is my goal right there yeah but anyway so the pike speak marathon goes up to the top top pike speak and comes down and a ridiculously common workout that you will see all of the locals do and when i moved here and i did the pike speak marathon for four or five years in a row or whatever i vividly remember everybody in town they would all group up and they would drive to the top of pike's peak because there's a toll road that goes to the top and you can drive your car up there and they start at the top at 14 000 feet and then go down three miles which just happens to be tree line there's an aid station there and things like that and there's a sign so it becomes a good marker they'd run down three miles and they'd run back to the top and they'd run down two miles and they'd run up to the top and they'd run down one mile and then run up to the top so it's called a three two one workout and like lindsey was mentioning it takes all day because you have to drive to the summit which is like a two-hour drive you have to do the workout which is really not that long like the distance of the workout is not that long but it takes all day because you're moving so slow and you're above 12 000

feet the entire time it's um it takes all day and you have to drive back down and i remember first thinking about it going oh wow that's a really badass workout like you're above 12 000 feet the whole time it must be so hard and you're sucking wind and it's gonna be so good for you but then i thought about it with my coaching hat i'm like that's dumb like that's just a dumb workout yeah from a physiology perspective it doesn't make any sense from an emotional like i feel prepared i get it there you go but to the amount of that athletes local athletes do that workout i just think it's crazy like i it's just not a good use of your time from training and recovery so but the the practical implications of this is there will be a lot of athletes that are going to a high altitude event and they want to go and do some course recon and typically what they get drawn to is the higher altitude sections of the course because they feel they need to cover those sections for some reason part of that some reason is i'm going to get this physiological adaptation for run from running or cycling or whatever it is from running at this high altitude 12 000 feet and what we're saying is that's dumb if you have a reason to run that section just for a psycho-emotional reason or whatever great go ahead and do it but if you think that you're like boosting your red blood cell count or getting a good workout in or whatever there are probably better ways to skin that cat yeah for sure and an example so a cts athlete that i

still work with he uh summited aconcagua a couple years ago and he actually works at the hospital next to the training center and he is uh the was the oldest guy on his expedition a three-week hike up this mountain that goes to 23 000 feet and so what we did was we'd come into my room in in the morning we'd like have him come in and slowly work on hiking with his pack up to 60 pounds and we took the room up to about 20 000 feet was the highest that we went just for safety perspective and i said we can do this as long as i can poke and prod you but really the main goal is for you to understand your pacing and what that means at that altitude just so you have an idea of what your breathing feels like so you're not going to be too stressed and we probably did this uh i don't know once or twice a week for three or four weeks uh for a training block and for that purpose he said it he one was the only person on the trip that didn't have any issues he was the most fit guy there and the oldest guy but he said a lot of it was just as they got to the higher altitudes he had a better idea of how to pace himself right so it wasn't a altitude acclimatization that we're trying to achieve it was a educational side of things of when i have this i have to now be okay with a you know a 20 minute mile walking pace or whatever it might have slowed down to or running at altitude you know you're normally running at an eight minute pace down here at 7 000 feet but up there at 14 minute pace and that's equivalent and understanding

what that caloric expenditure means and you know how many more calories you need to be taking in or less calories um i feel like that's where those really training high at an extreme altitude is helpful but you're not getting as an acclimatization out of it it's a educational uh for pacing for your ultimate performance so here's the practical piece of that right we've already ruled out that the physiology piece of it is kind of null and void if we've got the scenario of a person from chicago or florida or whatever coming out to leadville coming out to the pike speak marathon and as a coach you can put your coaching hat on we want to give them that experience of pacing and nutrition and things like that of running at 10 000 feet running at 12 000 feet then what do you do yeah i think you one you actually just have you're never going to be able to exactly mimic it so you know some people say like oh you can breathe through a straw and that'll mimic you know being at altitude well that's not really what we want to do i think it's important to one try to slow the pace down a little bit um i have a friend who actually lived in chicago and does the marathon every year in her first year she's like i couldn't believe how hard it was and i said well how much of it were you actually walking at the top rather than running and she said a lot of it and did you ever try hiking you know or walking in any of your long runs the answer is no so she wasn't prepared for the biomechanics shift of like hiking

and kind of loose gravelly sand compared to always running so part of that you just have to try to find even if it's not an altitude just trying to find a hill where you're having to hike up something so you're mimicking maybe the conditions or the terrain conditions rather than the environmental conditions and then also being okay and understanding that yes i have to slow down by five percent or six percent or fifteen percent whatever it might be and then that's actually okay as well i've i've had this experience where i've been i don't know if you have as well watching the pike speak marathon is i'll come down from the top to like the two mile marker so that's like twenty five hundred feet or twenty or sorry twelve thousand five hundred feet or twelve thousand eight hundred feet or something like that and i'll just watch the athletes go by and you know cheer them on it's it's a cool spot because you know the out and back course you can see the leaders come back and everybody's you know kind of cheering each other on but i always i always have this um i always have this vivid memory of the people going up will look at their watch and then get this dejected look on their face because they've inevitably looked at their pace and it's like 25 minute miles or something like that which is kicking ass at that altitude but not normal in any other circumstance yeah yeah and it's just i don't know how you know that's one where a coach can come into play and help you work through some of those things and be better prepared and experience is helpful too but yeah i mean that's just a side part of i

think hopefully if you are not prepared for it and you do it the first time the second time you better be prepared for it and understand what that is right so i can understand the first time being a little bit under prepared and showing up and not uh you know understanding the impacts of altitude but for you know training at altitude athletes i coach whether they're a weekend warrior athlete or high level athlete is like again let's get as fit as we can so when you're at that altitude your body can handle those conditions even better so you can make better decisions of saying a 25 minute pace is actually good and i'm not terrible because it gives you a moment to look around and think okay i'm actually keeping in line with everyone else i've been with where i'm gaining on people um at that pace you know and again i think when you're more fit you can make better connections in those extreme conditions whatever they may be so lindsey you've got all the tools yeah and you've got access to even more stuff that is not at the training center like you can call the people over at hypoxico and you can arrange for you know this that or the other i think i think a lot of people want to know at what point does it make sense to start throwing in some of these other tools that we commonly see for athletes to get prepared for the altitude like an altitude tent intermittent hypoxic exposure like at what point do you look at the situation as as a coach or as a physiologist work working with these types of athletes and say okay we need you need to do something that's outside of the environment that

we have at the training center what does that look like yeah i mean you probably listeners won't like my response and i to be honest it doesn't it's the same thing with some of our elite athletes that if we if i think you have five percent more to gain in your day-to-day training then we don't need to get fancy equipment so you know i have athletes and they want to get into the room and they wanted to do training i feel like some of our athletes kind of see that as a rite of passage of like i'm in this room i'm like i'm an olympian i really made it this is kind of like the icing on the cake and part of that is saying like if again if you still have five percent more to gain in your career do we need to go in the room or we do we need to just do our bread and butter our typical training so i think you know until we get to that point where you think you know you're really at the at the end of your ability to keep gaining fitness it's not necessary now is it fun to use for sure so if you have the ability and you want to use it i think it's okay to use altitude tents and other devices but we also want to try them out well in advance to a competition so if you're getting ready for the pike's peak marathon as an example i don't want to use my altitude tent for the first time you know five or six weeks prior to competition i hope we do one or two or three cycles of using it and understanding how you feel how that impacts your training so we actually can do it correctly so you know it's the same thing with biking and i'm the i'm uh you know uh do it too is that yeah i got

a new bike and i want it to be the lightest bike as i go up the mountain like i get it i want the lighter equipment the newer things um but then you want to make sure that when you have it you know how to use it properly so boring just get fit don't use all the tools well i always come back to and i'm going to give proper credit to this since it's your husband i always come back to a quote that that your husband dean gollett i'm going to get him on the podcast too if we can ever get like his schedule arranged to go and do that chance um but i always remember very early in my coaching career when dean was beating the crap out of me for something i did wrong you know and i mean what i mean by that is is like he was giving me a lecture for something that i had like incorrectly assessed with an athlete yes and he's great at that he's very good at that we've we've i had adam uh polford uh on the podcast earlier and we reminisced about some of the hunger games days oh geez dean being the primary instigator that but anyway i remember this he had he he did make he made a lot of impactful statements and and had a big impact on on my career and one of those impactful statements was when we were talking about altitude and we're going through all of the different scenarios this is right after the altitude uh clinic uh at the training center there several years ago we're going over all of these different scenarios of when you would use a tent and how you would use it and what the duration is and you know blah blah blah blah blah blah i probably spent two days talking

about this you probably remember this uh now that i'm going through the story and at the end of the whole thing he looks at everybody and all of us were rather young coaches at the time and he goes listen you guys can talk all this mumbo jumbo that you want to but remember you should win two world championships not just one but two and then you can think about using an altitude tent for an athlete because they have so much more to gain just with training and the fundamentals and nutrition and psychology and all these other things that if you're start if you're talking about your athlete that's coming to the pikes peak marathon that's going to run a six hour pike peak marathon which is admirable and you want to use an altitude for them look at the lower hanging fruit yep so even with the elite athletes there there's normally lower hanging fruit yeah it's true i mean the for an altitude perspective in our room i say no more than i say yes for athletes coming in for how to incorporate into your training for that exact reason is that maybe the timing's not right or we need to improve in a different area and that's not how the best use of your time and ability for training and recovery and all the other factors so well i'm sure in the environment that you have they want to do anything and everything legally possible to get an edge because i mean one percent is the difference between you know metal no metal making the finals like those little things and so they're curious will that actually make a difference and if it will they'll take it on but the fact that

you're that you of all people when that one to two percent does make a huge difference huge difference they're saying no more than you're saying yes i think that that says a lot yeah yeah it's easy to say yes really hard to say no and then explain why do you get a lot of pushback and say no but i need this like set me up i do and i think um one because yeah you know the athlete really again they don't quite understand they think they're doing everything they can right in reality if they take a step back you think okay i probably could be doing a little bit better in xyz um and the other thing it's this really neat shiny object that's tangible like you're walking into a room rather than just like having to like do one more interval or get another hour of sleep where you don't see those benefits right away where you can do the altitude training and you actually do see responses your return on your investment i guess in the training pretty quickly but the other stuff it takes time and it takes a lot more energy you know in the bigger picture to actually get the reward um so yeah it's tricky uh but it's you know and i think once you sit down with athletes and coaches and go through it they totally get it and and understand how to use it um and the reason why and then we plan ahead of you know if it doesn't work this cycle then how do we how are we going to do it next cycle which you know i think one thing that covet has been uh i think really great for athletes is that it's given us an ability to say like

put the brakes on we have a whole year to continue to prepare to be at our best and without any competitions which i know for the most of us it's been challenging because we like going out on our weekend racing but from an elite perspective i think it's been really helpful because it's given everybody a time to do a big foundation block of training that they normally never can do because they're chasing points all over the world to qualify for the olympics so it's given us the ability to like take a step back and do the hard work and ultimately be better prepared and to use these technologies of altitude and to heat and acclimatization over time and not squeeze them into a three-month period but now i have 10 months 12 months with some athletes of how can we better manage this and get a better return on our training investment that we're putting in so it's the way it should be yeah you know yeah it's the way it should be but it's definitely not in the world of you know olympic sport so because you're always chasing the next thing i mean we have this thing in ultra marathon where everybody is just they're race happy right they want to do one race another race they'll race eight or ten times a year and there's been a lot of commentary and i've been part of this commentary that has gone along the lines of well since we don't have any races to chase are all the races in 2021 or god forbid 2022 whenever they start coming back are we gonna see course records drop world records drop and things like that left and right because of this altered landscape

of what the training environment has looked like for the last year yeah and i think the answer to that is yes i mean the 5k world record was just broken smashed yeah just a few days ago and you know when you go through their preparation that was one of the things that he said he said i actually had time to focus on training i wasn't having to go to these track meets to make money and to qualify you know my spot as an athlete or my team as a country um you know i could just focus on my training and all of a world record is broken i think and it had stood for what 16 years um in the 5k and and so it's possible that in 2021 we're going to see world records for a lot of timed events drop you know for certain courses have you seen we were planning on talking about this because this is going to be like heat and altitude but i do want to get into part of how covid is impacting the olympics from your perspective have you relating to that theme have you seen a lot of athletes like overarching training architecture change once they knew that okay it's 2021 here are the dates you know we're not going to be doing much for 2020 did you see a market change in that um with my sports not necessarily i mean i think one of the big things is uh rather than uh you know trying to push through the the spring when everything started to get canceled um we just told everyone said hey let's stop let's take a season break right now um you know anywhere from like one week to two weeks to three weeks for some athletes something

that you know that's a long break for a lot of athletes three weeks that they haven't taken um for many years and then it allowed us to say okay when they came back we know we have 13 months of training and we just we looked at the calendar and then just basically said we're going to only focus on the olympics and if there's any events along the way we'll come back and fill those in and you know reconfigure our planning um but ultimately it's it i feel like it's been positive for the programs that i work with um one you know cycling athletes could still go out and ride their bikes every day they weren't stuck inside sports like boxing and wrestling and swimming they were really impacted initially from covid and i think that was a lot a bigger challenge for those groups but cycling triathlon running they could still do all their training so i feel like it it's it mentally it's negative but from a physiological perspective it's pretty ideal in the timeline that they have to now regroup recover and rebuild for the next 10 months getting ready for the games yeah because when they announced the olympics it was like in may or june sorry yeah yeah i can't remember something around then yeah so the like the picture that you're kind of painting is almost like a post world championships type of setup where they take a pretty hard break and then they've got in the olympics case this is you know 13 months but in a world championship case it's usually like three four six eight months to where they have their next kind of like big competition yeah wow but then the fact

i think the fact that there will it's highly unlikely that there will be a lot of events until then that's the thing that's really different yeah it is tricky and um you know i think everybody is trying to figure out what that means and again for some it's not an issue you know i feel like with our elite level athletes um that they're very internally motivated so they don't necessarily have to have a competition throughout the build up to think like i need to have two or three peaks leading into the olympics like everyone is okay with like i'm good peaking for my competition on august 3rd or whatever date it might be that uh and i think that's the a little bit of a different mentality than someone like myself where i'm like i kind of need a carrot to keep myself going and motivated day in and day out um that you know that timeline 10 months 12 months from now that's enough motivation no matter what you know to get up every day and to do what what they need to get done have you guys been able to test just as frequently there was it like shut down for yeah we've been shut down so um still right now we're not doing any uh physical testing so i can do testing uh like not in our labs our performance lab so no testing like vo2 max testing um lactate testing or blood testing we're not doing anything um in that close proximity at this point um i'm sure

we'll get back to that here pretty soon um but really we can do any testing that i can keep an appropriate and safe distance from from an athlete um and that's anywhere between six to 12 feet depending on the intensity and how many people are in a in a room so the good thing with our sports is that there's so much wearable technology is that we can still do a lot of training and a lot of testing minus taking blood lactates or um you know other type of blood values or typical like vo2 value but um i could get a machine set up and have an athlete run and kind of then step back six to 12 feet you know and monitor the the cart and different things while they're doing it so we haven't done that but we have all the equipment and set up to do so um when the time comes um but we're getting there i would say uh like i mentioned earlier that road world championships are still happening we have a few athletes there are quite a few athletes here in town right now so the velodrome in town is back up um i've been going in a couple times a week there being there with the athletes and the coaches and getting back into training but we all have our masks on we're all keeping our distance our we're our training times are longer because we can only have so many athletes at the velodrome at one time um so what might normally have been a two or three hour training session or day turns into a six hour day because we have to have multiple groups but the athletes can still get in their training they're still getting the coaching feedback and the data that they need to to you

know keep moving forward yeah it's weird man it's really weird yeah it is crazy but i mean athletes will figure it out right i mean if we've learned anything we're working with a lot of high level athletes is they always find a way they always figure it out yeah yes all right lindsey we're gonna let you go yeah thanks i really appreciate it um i'm looking forward to listening to the podcast and all future podcasts that you have but let me know if you have any questions or anything else along the way on altitude or heat i'm here i appreciate your time lindsey but more importantly i've always appreciated your uh your counsel and like being a colleague of yours over the years you're smart as a whip you as the listeners now know you're very pragmatic in the advice that you give everybody from the elite athletes to myself to you know everyday athletes that we work with and um i've always thought that the practitioners that work in the sports science field that can be that translational physiologist is that the term that you use i'm gonna totally steal that from you now i stole it from someone i can't remember i heard it on a podcast and i was like oh i'm using that okay well we tend to recycle and borrow things from everybody anyway so i don't think anybody's gonna get offended but the practitioners that are in the sports science field that can take the information that we can derive from laboratory settings and bring them into a real world application those are few and far between because all too often we want to use all the tools that we have

available we want to use all the technology we want to use all the data even to the detriment of the end user which are the athletes and you do not do that you take what you need and you leave aside what you don't and the manifestation of that is just get fit great yeah it's simple all right i love it we're gonna let you go lindsey i hope to see you down the line we'll have our masks on and everything but good luck to the athletes and uh good luck to you and your group in tokyo yeah thanks so much i appreciate it and there you have it there you go appreciate the heck out of lindsey as i mentioned on the podcast over the course of however many years i've known her for her counsel and appreciate her time that she spent with us on the podcast today hope everybody found that enlightening if you do get the chance and after the covet 19 pandemic starts to wind down do yourself a favor go to the olympic training center and take one of their tours it is absolutely fascinating they go by a lot of these different areas of the training center that lindsey mentioned that the athletes have access to but they open it up to the public and they do it in a really insightful way where sometimes the staff of the training center will take you around and many times the athletes themselves will actually take you around and i'm not a big person for a lot of the tourist things that you can do in normal tourist towns but this is one that i think is definitely worth it so if you're ever in town do yourself a favor go to the training center and take that tour appreciate to all of the listeners out there if you've

not had the chance skip on over to apple podcasts and give this podcast a rating or review it means the world to me when i see those five star ratings come across the wire appreciate everybody listening today we will see you out on the trails you