Antidoping Solutions for Ultrarunning Part 4 - Charlie Ware | Koopcast Episode 84

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this podcast goes right in line with our last few it is all about anti-doping solutions and issues in the sport of trail and ultra running all in an effort to try to forge a solution this episode of the podcast is with somebody one of the very few people who have actually put forth the effort to bring the community together and actually find a solution and he got pretty darn far in that process and it's kind of a shame that it stalled out and hopefully we can pick it back up that is charlie where i have the utmost amount of respect for charlie for going through what he went through trying to make this happen it was a really painstaking effort and i hope that comes through for uh through this podcast these solutions are not easy they're going to take a lot of work but i also hope that it inspires somebody or a group of people to really take the torch from here we don't have to use the solution that charlie has to date but we can certainly use components of it in all or in part so i wanted to i wanted to bring him on the on the podcast today to talk about all of those different aspects what he felt the current pitfalls are and how we actually move forward i cannot tell you how much admiration

i have for charlie not only as an athlete he's a really darn good runner but for him taking it upon himself to do something better for the sport that should be admired that should be emulated and we should absolutely build off of what he has done to date so here we go i can get right out of the way here's my conversation with charlie ware you recovering right i was gonna ask you the same thing man i'm doing pretty good i had a markedly average race out there uh how about yourself yeah yeah i went for my first run again today and felt really good nice that course is it's deceivingly painful but i always recover really quick from it yeah yeah you know i think it's because you're never really going that fast on that course because you're always bouncing up and down that it's a little easier on the body dude once they get the 100k version of that point to point it is going to be epic it's going to be the best 100k races in the world i completely agree i was talking with joe about that after i'm like this race is going to be amazing it's super difficult completely beautiful the whole way it's just yeah yeah i can't i can't wait man i don't know i don't think i told you this i actually thought it was 100k until like the week before the race i met i missed some critical piece of communication you know and i was like oh well i guess it's only 50 miles or whatever because the website was still referring to the 100k distance that

they wanted to do the covid year they had to cancel and i think joe was just like man i'll leave this up and like the field's so small we can handle it that's hilarious i wonder if you're the only one i think there's several people like this this isn't what i signed up for it's totally my fault it's totally my fault for not paying attention to this to tell all my athletes to do right pay attention to the pre-race emails it's totally my fault i did not pay attention to the pre-race emails and i've been using this as an example like raising my hand being the idiot i've been using this an exam as an example that you know that i screw a i screwed up too but b you got to pay attention to these things because they're going to change and sometimes that changes material like 50 miles versus 100k and then often it's like really simple things though that um that athletes need to be aware of like canyons change course right which was the same weekend and a couple people apparently got off course uh because they had like they had like recon the old course or whatever and i just think that's going to be a little bit of the norm where there's going to be some small detail whether it's the course or aid stations or crew access or something like that that's going to change in the last minute that it's not material at the end of the day but still people have to pay attention to right yeah yeah well at least you had a shorter day out there yeah i don't know man i was looking forward to 100k next year man next year epic that i'm telling you man that's going to be so good i can't wait i can't

wait all right all right enough talk about zangray even though it's a cool race we're going to talk about something else uh we're going to talk about this uh this the solution that you largely spearheaded to try to get some type of anti-doping efforts into the sport of trail and ultra running and uh the listeners kind of like won't know a lot of the background here but this is this is something that was really working in the background for a long period of time that if that a few people knew about and if you can explain who a few people are because this is this is your deal but this is probably the first like kind of like public unveiling of uh of this right because i remember going through it um we were trying to kind of keep it like tight knit so that the media didn't have an opportunity to kind of like influence it or get their hands on it or whatever we really wanted like the athletes to to to take control of it so i feel kind of honored that you'd come on this podcast and start to and start and start to talk about it considering it really was kind of under a lid for a lot of the a lot of the workings of it but i want to i want you to to take the floor here in terms of what you were trying to do and what the general construction of it looked like so why don't we start with that what is the like umbrella construction of this anti-doping effort within

the sport of ultra running what did that what was that starting to look like when it was really being worked on okay so so there's quite a bit to unpack here so i want to start with um this was about this was all happened a couple years ago and then we ran into some hiccups which we'll talk about today uh which kind of stalled the the movement on this project and this uh the collective was what we call it um so now fast forward we're two years later covid happened and races weren't happening and everybody kind of just checked out for a while and i put it in the back of my mind for a while and i didn't want to think about it for a long time and um now a couple things have happened in the running world that i think are you know bringing it back up again uh you had lisa roberts on and i know she had talked to me about the efforts that we tried doing a couple years ago so so we're bringing it back from the dead um so let's start about why we we started this to begin with um so it was terraware a couple years ago um that's my first time doing a utwt race uh that was overseas and it was the first time that i was summoned by the courts program to go get a blood test which is their their version of testing um for one of their races for elite athletes and i did and i went through their process uh and i and i kind of saw that it was a little silly uh and then i'm in new zealand and i was staying with carrie if you know carrie over there he's an amazing guy him and ali and we were

talking about it and how the courts program is kind of bullshit and especially for if you're not living in europe it's it's really just a um a facade of being a doping program when it's not really doing anything you know courts just to just to just to before we get too far courts is the program that a lot of european races will use in like you said this anti-doping well i'm going to use the word effort very loosely UTMB uses it some of the uh ultra trail world tour races use it or maybe all of them use it but it's a program that kind of simultaneously what in their in their words does health monitoring through blood screens that are performed by uh by a runner or a person who's enrolled in the program's primary care physician so you can imagine you go in your primary care doctor they do a blood draw on you you send the results of that blood draw into the court system we'll leave it at that and then they perform some race day testing services mainly at some of the major ultra marathons and the north american ultra runners really only touch this when they go to those overseas races the the majority of which are in europe correct yeah and so you know going through that process and you know it's a blood test it's not a drug test but it comes off as though they're doing a drug testing you know experience for the athletes when it's it's not really um and yeah they do the

race day testing we can get into that later but it just didn't seem like it was anything that was effective and if anything it was a huge hassle um they contacted me two weeks before i was going on an international trip and said go somewhere and get a blood test and send us the results and i had no idea i took the yeah the form they had to one lab and they're like we don't even know what this is this is like europe and you need an american doctor to prescribe this and i was just like running all over trying to get this blood test done when i was trying to pack for this trip so it was just annoying more than anything so i'm at terra where i've always had this idea that it would be really cool if the athletes themselves decided hey you know we want to protect our sport um let's let's get testing done on our own like let's fork over our own money and say we want to be tested and start this uh this program that is built by the athletes for the athletes in an effort to protect the awesome sport that we have um so it doesn't take the road that cycling a lot of the other endurance sports have had down the road and so i had this conversation over a beer with with carrie in new zealand and then sure enough the next day at the elite athlete panel in front of 300 people he calls me out and says oh charlie wears got a good idea for how to explain this to everybody how we can do this that's how it always starts over a beer and an innocent conversation and then all of a sudden you're like mucked up in the weeds of something well there i am on a microphone you know on stage explaining to 300 kiwis how i think

we should get drug testing in the sport um and so after that i just felt like i had to follow up on that and i got a lot of good feedback from the folks and the athletes who are there and yeah that is a good idea what if we just dished over a little bit of money and we started getting tested and you know it could be a start of something cool so i began to build some policy of how this could actually work um i contacted usada i actually contacted a couple other private drug testing companies first because i didn't know if usada was the route that we wanted to take but the other the private companies were very expensive and i need to figure out how to do this really economically and so with usada it can be done fairly economically and my idea is that okay if we get 20 athletes together and we all chip in small amount of money we don't all need to get to be tested all the time but what if we got six or seven tests that went out randomly to our pool of 20 people anytime throughout the year so we could all potentially be tested which is just as effective as us all being tested and that way we could keep the cost down and that's kind of where the whole idea started and so then was the very hard part of contacting a whole bunch of elite athletes and asking them if they want to fork over a bunch of money into to get out of competition testing done on them and the way that i set up the program was that i contacted the top 10 males and females from the

western states 100 the previous year as well as the top 10 ultra runners of the year and so that gave me my core of elite athletes and the reason why i picked those that is well one i was in that because i came in top 10 of the year before at states but i also learned how much you can gain from a top 10 at states and i think that's one of the primary reasons for gaining a sponsorship and you know gain some leverage in the sport as well as you're right so that gave me my initial pool of athletes so i reached out to all the men and women in that pool and explained to them how this could work how much it would cost the cost was going to be 375 dollars per athlete and if all of us got in i think it would have ordered i think seven tests seven to ten tests and there was maybe 20 or 25 of us maybe a little bit more maybe 30 again this was a couple years ago so i'm trying to recall it all right now yeah yeah but it's hundreds of dollars not tens of thousands of dollars so that was the big thing is that you know all together we pulled you know 15 000 bucks or whatever and that allowed us to order seven tests and that was that that's all we needed you know we could all be tested any time and anybody could get it it was completely random as to who would go to so therefore we have a situation in place where everybody's aware that somebody could show up on their doorstep and say hey be in the cup which to me is the only effective way of having testing it's not race day testing

it's not a silly little pledge or a temporary tattoo that says i run clean or whatever so so that was the the basic idea and then there was i expanded this into a larger um a larger idea called the collective so the core members are that top 10 uroy and western states and that will change every year but that's the core and then other folks because there's way more elite athletes out there they can opt into the collective and basically they would just pay their 375 and now they're in the testing pool the way we worked it out is that we would try to grow the pool to get as many elites in there as we could and there's ways we can do that by you know essentially having races agree that they will only give prize money to those who are in the collective right um to deal with you know maybe some folks should probably have more of a chance of getting tested than other folks you know the more elite folks versus those who are kind of sub elite or b level or c level um we would use itra rankings so for instance for the men if you had a ranking 800 and above um the idea was that 70 percent of the tests would go to those with rankings of 800 above and 30 of the tests would go to those below 800 and obviously the more people that opted in the more tests we'd be able to order i want to say it's about 12 or 1300 bucks per test and that includes the traveling to the athlete taking the test analysis so it's really not that expensive if you're not

looking at testing everyone all the time but just having the chance of being tested um so that's it in a nutshell and you know to further that my idea was more than just drug testing for this collective i thought it was a way to just make it unifying essentially a governing body for our sport that is run for the athletes by the athletes that could tackle other things that weren't just testing so for instance maybe there was unequal uh prize money for males and females at a race well maybe as a collective we could vote on that and say we're not going to go to this race unless that becomes equal prize money and it gives us power as athletes to to have a say in our sport and help shape our sport so that to me was even more exciting than the the testing component but i thought the testing component could be what launched the collective 100 okay so this this is a good opportunity to take a pause because every there's a lot but everybody listening right now is thinking of all of the different ways to game the system because when anti-doping rules eventually come up people look at the cracks in the window how is a doper going to slip through the crack over here and slip through the crack over there we just mentioned the race day testing everybody realizes that that's really not the most effective way to do it people still get caught all the time we see examples of that all the time where get people get caught on race day testing but people are going to do the same thing with this they're going to look at this and say okay there's not that many tests

actually going around per the number of people that are in the pool somebody could not be in the pool and still go win a big race and then get into the the collective like retroactively because they're they become a member and on and on and on and on and i don't think we're going to go through all of those we might hit some of the big ones but what i wanted to point out to the listeners is this is a proposed emphasis on the word proposed or was is is we'll use is right because it's still it's active it's active until the dad it is a proposed start emphasis on the word words proposed start it is not the final solution and i'm gonna evoke a conversation that i had a long time ago with uh usada's former chief operating officer john frothingham on this on this on this very subject and those who the people who follow uh anti-doping kind of around the world will certainly recognize john's name because he's been really influential uh in the space uh when when i was talking to him about this almost in parallel to when you were coming up with this uh collective idea he said listen you're going to have to realize that initially you have imperfect yet implementable solutions out of the gate there are going to be holes in them and that's fine but you have to start somewhere and this is the start this is kind of the start somewhere piece so to summarize you've got a

pool of athletes that are created from performance and well basically from performance western states performance in the in the uroy votes right that pool of athletes creates essentially all kicks in a little bit of money and they all could get randomly tested at some point and in addition to that there's targeted testing within a cohort of athletes that are kind of at the at the top based on their itcher ranking essentially right yeah which is you know everybody in that core would be in that that group exactly everybody who's is has an itr ranking above 800 is going to be that group okay so you reached out to the athletes to say hey what was you know what do you guys what do you guys and gals think and this is how i got involved in it because my the athletes that i would that i was working with and i still am working with they sought my counsel on it and so i had to look through it and tell them what i thought about it and i wholeheartedly encourage them to keep going down and this is an athlete focused solution but you had a broader context because you had this big group of people that you were then saying hey what do you think about it let's run through we're gonna have to generalize some of these because it's a big group of people but let's kind of run through what the athletes how the athletes were reacting to this and what the feedback you were getting was well i'll start by saying that it was pretty scary to reach out to all the athletes only because i mean some of these men and women are like my heroes

top 10 at western states top 10 you're right people yeah totally yeah i'm like contacting like rob carr and you know according to walter i'm like you know these people i admire and like are my heroes but it was also easy because to be honest with you jason i really don't think there's any doping amongst this group of athletes and that's really how i was framing it and it's like it was easy to reach out because it's it's easy to ask somebody who you know you you admire and love all these people and you're saying our sport's awesome right now let's figure out how we can keep it that way you know and when it's framed that way it's it's not like oh there's doping our sport we need to get it out of here it's like no our sport's awesome let's keep it that way and just make sure we preserve what we have so that being said it made it a little easier to approach all the athletes so let's talk about how they took it and i will say that overwhelmingly everybody was game um and that was awesome it took a load off right away responses ranged from most people just saying cool sounds great i'm in and then um a couple folks took some more convincing which was nice because it actually made me think things out into more depth and i'm sure those folks think i'm a huge pain in the ass which i am i put my salesman hat on and i will say that you know by the end of it and all my phone conversations and emails everybody was in um maybe there was one or two folks that never got back to me and i think that might just been the wrong email i had um so it was very encouraging to see that everybody was in

um however there was some concerns that were brought up and those concerns were very legit and i think that's what stalled the momentum on this because i didn't quite know where to go from there and i started losing energy with the project at that point when i got caught up on these concerns so maybe that would be a good segue to go into like what were the issues with this and why it stalled out yeah let's do it and i think one i think a big piece of framework to keep in mind about this is compared to what happens in usa track and field and uh in cycling other endurance sports and even at the collegiate level is that the athletes themselves are wholly responsible for creating the policy they're not having the policy they're not having to adopt a policy that currently exists because of the sport they play or the organization that they are in and because of that because the athletes are wholly responsible you get a lot of well hey i i like this part but i don't like this part i don't like this part and i really like this part most athletes going to even the ones going to going to the olympics the one participate the ones participating participating in national championships they don't have a say with the very small exception of using their athlete representative within the organization that they're a part of as like a conduit to help create policy here the athletes have 100 of the say so

it is i mean you you kind of alluded to having a little bit of a salesman job and i can imagine how that went because a lot of athletes and this is why it's so powerful but also so one of the reasons why it's so powerful but also so difficult a lot of athletes this is their career and they want to do the right things for themselves that's we're always looking out for number one first and foremost they want to do the right things for their career and it's hard it's hard to be the first you there are a lot more problems when you're first than when you're following and i think that that kind of came out through some of these conversations you had with athletes so what what were some of the stumbling blocks that you mentioned charlie yeah so i got a little list of some of the stuff so the first i'll say what you said there that we're creating our own uh protocol and program here and i think that was a little hard for folks to wrap their head around especially when it came to things like like pot all right so that was something that i had to be it was addressed right off the bat it's like i don't want to get popped because i got marijuana in my system when i'm relaxing over the summer and i'm not even racing yeah and so you know that was very easy to say that well one it's not against um any water rules to have pot in your system out of competition and two we're making our own program and we could say we don't want marijuana tested for it's just not even part of it we don't care it's not you know if they want to do it at race day testing this isn't race day testing so that was one thing right off the bat that i think folks were you know i mean it's legal on the entire west coast right now and

i'm not judging anybody i mean go for it so we did have to talk about that and i think that folks understood like you can do whatever you want your free time that's not concerned here but an important part of that is the educational component right just the fact that water treats it as an incompetent as prohibited in competition and not out of competition that isn't that being an example of an educational point for people i think speaks to a broader topic of education as a whole that that part of is is incredibly difficult because that's not a that is not a controversial it's controversial in the sense of should it be legal should it be illegal but it's not controversially controversial in the sense that is it prohibited in competition or out of competition all it takes is a little bit of education but yet it still was an educational stumbling block is the point that i'm that i'm trying to make yeah yeah absolutely and that's where usado can really come into big value there with their educational program uh the next would be the convenience and the invasiveness of out of competition testing and so there's two different programs within usada for how strict the protocols are for your whereabouts and we're doing the less strict one and so you basically just have to put a whereabouts form in um i think like monthly but you just let them know if you're going on vacation or something it's not a daily check-in which is like what olympians have to do um and it's it's pretty lax too you can miss

two tests and the third test is when you know things will start to get serious but it's not like at the end of the world if you went camping for the weekend someone showed up and you weren't there so that was something we had to go over that it's not this invasive thing that you have to check in all the time let somebody know where you're at all the time um but you do have to make yourself somewhat available and i understood that i mean nobody wants to feel like you know checking in with big brother all the time so that was a legit thing but i think that their lax uh protocol that they have is um it's doable and if you want to have testing in the sport it's the least you can do um the next would be who controls the money management that was a little bit of a up in the air thing so the way i had thought is that we basically create a pool of money like an account within usada um which some folks thought wasn't the best idea and i actually tend to agree with them i think ideally the collective would have its own account and we can pay usada for their services rather than usada running the financials but then it's like well who controls that and it really needs to be somebody who's not um one of the athletes i think that's taking people's money paying it so that's just kind of like a business side of it like how how it would work and we got a little caught up there yeah and i can tell you from uh usada side of things they try to do everything and this will we will have touched this subject in the podcast with dr fedorik which the listeners can uh can

reference and i'll be in the show notes um usada is very uh they're very focused on making sure that when they do these programs with with really any entity that the where the money comes from is completely independent from how the testing actually occurs there's a separation of church and state that they absolutely have to go through so that the people footing the bill aren't influencing the actual process and that happens at all levels that happens within their ufc program which is uh uh become a a really good example for uh other uh other sporting organizations to use that's the that is uh true with uh entities like usa track and field and usa triathlon that is a very important point when we're talking about all this is that the people ultimately footing the bill need to be kind of removed from the inner operations of the actual testing protocol who gets tested how frequently they get tested and things like that right right yeah so it's almost like we would need you know some some other folks spearheading right right you need to be the athletes need to be blinded to it essentially right if they're paying the bill they need to be blinded to how the how the tests are actually being allocated yeah for sure so you don't have charlie in there saying oh i want to test this person because they're you know they're racing western states and i want that m10 spot again

exactly um yeah i don't want to be in charge of people's money either okay and then uh then we had some folks who were a little burnt out on anti-doping um and i totally get that because all the ones that they've done are nonsense up to this point you know i had folks saying like listen i don't want to do another pledge or put my face on another website that says i'm clean and stuff and we're like hey i don't think there's any dopamine problem in our sport so why are we doing this it's a huge pain in the ass i totally get it i get where they were coming from but again my my response was yeah let's keep it that way man like it's awesome right now but it's really naive to think that it's not going to come into our sport as we're growing exponentially um and you know as far as the previous like the pledges and um you know the websites i don't know where you sign something it's all good-hearted but it really does nothing and you know i would just i just told these guys listen this is real this is someone showing up at your door asking you to piss the cup like this is not a pledge so i just don't this is exactly what i don't want it to look like so charlie can i tell you how much i appreciate your honesty there because it's hard it's hard for a lot of elite athletes to say things like that because they don't want to be anti anti-doping efforts right and a lot of the pledges and even courts which you're critical of at the very beginning

of it and by the way i share all of those criticisms to an even greater extent that's another podcast but it's very very very difficult for elite athletes to look at any anti-doping quote-unquote effort a pledge hashtag clean sport on twitter kind of whatever it is and and apply criticism to that because immediately they have this they have this uh spotlight cast on them where they are anti anti-doping efforts and so just the fact that you're able to call a spade a spade brother like i i appreciate that about you man uh you know i don't have a big sponsorship or anything so i got nothing to do um so so lastly i think it's it's the big one and this is the one that really stalled it out um it's the false positives and that actually has a a segue into the the bigger problem with false positives so i know you've talked about this with your or you're going to talk about it with um the usada doctor um but just to give you a brief uh recap on what the problem is here is okay well it's what if there's a false positive and then we get busted and it was a contaminated supplement that we were taking and then we're screwed and our careers over well the reality is there aren't really any false positives the tests are extremely accurate so it is a positive positive but it could be from a contaminated supplement or some wacky supplement from some company that puts banned substances in it and

so that situation really sucks and it it does come up it has come up in a lot of other sports and these athletes you know yes they could have done better education they didn't do they deserve to be punished not not really they need their name cleared because they were taking this wacky supplement and then the big problem is to have your name cleared if something like that happens to you um and let's just say you're taking this multivitamin and it was in this facility that has a banned substance in it the tests are so accurate that it could trigger right um right to clear your name would involve several retests potentially having that supplement and anything any other thing that you're eating or taking in all third party tested and so you're looking at a process that could be from 10 to 50 000 to clear your name from this situation and that's what we don't have money for we have the money to get the testing but this retesting to clear someone's name presents a huge issue and it's almost like we need some type of insurance program this big pot of money that can help people if they get caught in this situation i did have some thoughts on how that could happen and how we could create like an insurance pot um like for instance i got contacted the run rabbit run race directors uh paul and fred up there and i was like would you guys just want to donate that 160 thousand dollar pot to the ultra and they were cool they're like hell yeah but you got to bring a bunch

of elites to our race nice i like that you guys got a bunch of money to throw around can we have some of it that's a good way that was an idea um but we would have you know it would be there would be no prize money that year and we would have to commit to a lot of elites going uh or maybe just you know crowdsource it and send it out to you know the the interweb and see if we can get a bunch of people to throw in money so we have this insurance program um but you know whoever however we do it there does need to be something in place there to help people if they get caught in a situation and i think that was where we stalled out because that's where it got tricky and i sure as hell don't want to be responsible for somebody getting caught in a situation like that where like their career and their life is on the line that's that is the sticking point with any anti-doping effort whether it's something at a race or uh continual athlete monitoring as as you were trying to put in place what does the adjudication look like when somebody tests positive what are the steps that need to happen in order to verify that positive test or what are the steps so that the athlete can say listen this is the this is what happens and who owns and pays for that process always very tricky usually very expensive as you mentioned because that involves retesting and sometimes legal fees and things like that so it's it's a it's a the way that i thought about it when i saw that same feedback coming from the

athletes is it's a known issue and but not one without solutions that already exist in other organizations whether that be insurance or finding other sources of funding so it it is 100 a stumbling block but some i think i view it as something that is ultimately surmountable given enough time and reasonable action amongst the actors that are trying to orchestrate the solution yeah i think you're right however i still wouldn't feel comfortable launching the program until there something yeah yeah yeah because you have to be fair to the athletes right and this is this is always one of the issues with anti-doping programs is whenever you take a maximalist approach either let's ban everybody for life for any infraction or the other maximalist approach is just like let everybody do whatever they want and show up to the starting line whenever you take like either one of those uh approaches there's nowhere to negotiate from there you always have to start out with reasonable solutions and unfortunately one of the stumbling blocks with the reasonable solution is is what do you do when people actually get caught because ultimately if the anti-doping program is effective you are catching people like you're going to have that happen that's completely realistic in any sort of rules any rules let's just take it out of out of doping anytime you have any rules you have to be

in a position to where you're going to ultimately enforce some sort of aspect when somebody breaks the rules and this is a big one right right and that was another thing too it's like well how do we enforce this as a collective um let's say somebody is you know it's been retested it's been proven you know this person was doping right what do we do right what's the penalty exactly what's the penalty and i thought that was actually pretty easy is you know usada makes their um you know they post it on their website so it's they do public announcement of it and then just let it be up to the race directors and most races already have a zero tolerance policy so that portion is pretty easy to me it would just be usada posted and then races can do what they want with that information sponsors can do it as well most sponsors have uh policies within their sponsor within their sponsorship that they can relieve the athlete of the sponsorship if they run afoul of any of anything like this well and actually now that you brought up sponsorship that was a big part of it too is relaying the cost to sponsors after after the program got launched and building the fee into contracts so you say when you go to re-sign it say hey you need to cover my uh 375 fee of the collective and then i'll sign the contract and how cool would that be for the sponsors to be the one's you know paying for all the athletes to be in this collective i thought that was a nice way that take the money stress off the athletes and just put it build it right into contracts that's obviously have a sponsored contract but you know it could be something that builds into them putting

more money into the sport investing in the the integrity of the sport which is really going to serve them in the long run too that that's something i'm glad you brought that up charlie so the athletes are footing the bill right and initially initially let's just call 400 bucks right just to make the kind of make the number even that's a reasonable cost for some people but some people are going to look at that and go listen i don't i don't my money's better served elsewhere i got kid on the way you've got a child on the way right yes hey for college and things like that um did you get any pushback from the athletes on either the initial cost or if they were to extrapolate into into future years what that ultimately might be because there are no guarantees as to is that cost going to go up down or stay sideways right um i did uh just from a couple folks and it was totally legit we had a good conversation about it and my solution was well what can you contribute and we'll just put that into the funds and that's fine and that that'll be what you can contribute this is what we're asking for you know it's it's a it's a pool of athletes and we're getting x amount of tests so what what can you donate and that was you know maybe they throw in 100 bucks and hey you're in the pool all right okay so we're going through this man the only thing that i can think of is is this all sounds so simple and reasonable it's right it's a it's reasonable from a cost perspective it has external management usada is managing it the athletes control the destiny so where's the hang-up where's the ultimate hang-up because it doesn't exist right now right

that treasure chest we need is insurance i think that is the hang-up that's the hang-up in my mind because it scares the shit out of me that someone will be caught up in and i've heard a horror story of an athlete going to you know i think it was UTMB and they got caught up in this process and it cost them tens of thousand dollars to clear their name from a tainted supplement and that is horrifying to me that someone would have to go through that because of this so i i won't go anywhere until there's a big pot of money with this with this collective that that can help people if they get caught so situation so where does it stand right now charlie i mean i saw the initial conceptual documents from from my athletes once again i tried to educate them as much as possible i actually went over to the usada offices and i met with them personally about this just to ask them how i could help and with the principal people that were involved but where where does it stand right now well i think we're at left is you know usada i did i talked with them extensively and they were down they're like cool we're gonna we just opened up a ufc program and the next step we're gonna have an ultra running program you know whatever you guys want the budget on those are completely incomparable though i mean maybe it just siphons the money from that usc fund and the the mountain hippie running fund we're not going to be nearly as problematic as the fighters though it's another story it's a little story so anyway sorry so where so so you saw it is down why why don't we see it i guess is what i'm asking

we're down and it just it just stalled out because of that and to be honest with you i lost steam after that where i just poured so much energy like you know physically and emotionally into getting this thing going and i just couldn't i couldn't keep going and figure out the next part the next solution without having more there were a lot of athletes who totally helped and were very instrumental and i wasn't going at it alone i'll tell you that too you know a lot of them are awesome kyle patari just got to give him a shout out because he's a lawyer and he brought his lawyer brain into it and he was really helpful and awesome uh amongst a bunch of other folks but i think where it is now is it's it's there it's out in the atmosphere now and in the the framework is in place and it just needs someone else to take it and run with it that's not training to try to podium at western states you know it needs somebody who's not uh who's outside of the the pool to to figure it out how it's going to work figure out those financials how to set up the account um i just kind of need to pass the torch on somebody because i'm i'm just too busy right now too i got a kid on the way and i'm full time job and i'm training like crazy and i personally i just got burnt out on it so that's where it's at well here's the thing so this is going to go out publicly to my tens of millions of listeners

it's not really that many not even close this is going to go out to the ultra running community right and there's going to be people that hopefully and i and i am very hopeful for this that wanted that want to take up the mantle and what i want to emphasize to the listeners and charlie i want you to opine on this as well what i want to emphasize to the listeners it is that something like this is going to take our own community's elbow grease to get over the line ultra runners we are a really stubborn persistent lot we do these crazy stupid things we torture our bodies and things like that we are a community that is set up exactly for things like this we are set up to pursue to persevere and push through and create our own solutions so if there's a failure of this type of program we're going to own it as a community it's it's kind of all on us we can't rely and we're not going to be able to rely on a usa track and field on a usa triathlon on another national governing body to implement these solutions so i kind of put my i'm both disappointed because this has been so long let's time stamp this for a little for everybody charlie pre-covid is when you were working this what year uh let's see i think it was 2018 is when this 2018 so three years right going on three 2019 okay two three years i guess is significant a significant period of time is kind of what i was

trying to get across even with covid kind of kind of interrupting it but what i wanted to say is is i'm personally as a member of the community and i raised my hand as somebody who could have worked a little bit harder to to help push this across the line sooner i'm saying i'm simultaneously optimistic because we do have a lot of willpower and horsepower behind us that people can actually get this done but i'm also disappointed that it hasn't crossed the line sooner than this and that's no disrespect to you charlie but i because you're doing the you're doing all the work or most of the work you and kyle um i i i would like to see more people actively get more involved and help push it across the line more horsepower more people put your actions and your money and your uh whatever you can contribute behind your mouth because there's a lot of people that will talk there's a lot of people out there that'll say yeah you know we need to do this we need to do that we need to do the other but there needs to be just as many people talking as actually acting when we have solutions like this because it does it takes a lot of freaking human power to get these solutions across the line it's not like we're going to snap our fingers and all of a sudden there's a solution yeah yeah i agree yep it's a good call out i think you know people know what the hiccups are and if some folks have ideas and how we can get around it and figure this out that would be amazing um it sounds like you know you are pretty

invested yourself and i really feel like i'm passing the torch to you man i told you and the listeners will know this from listening to the previous podcast is when this initially came out i i took a step back because i was afraid of the lance connection and i didn't want to muddy the waters with that i don't care anymore like that that story is 20 some odd years old i have no connection with lance you know if people want to make a big deal about it they can make a big deal about it but i'd rather i'd rather take the arrows and help get us help get a solution across the line than sit on the sidelines and you know passively kind of watch not that you're doing nothing but passively kind of watch nothing happen so whether or not i'm certainly part of that horsepower that i mentioned earlier i'm having you on my podcast i've had all these other guests on my podcast i'm trying to take an active role with it within my athletes but it can't just be me right it's a community and that's what i really want to emphasize it's a community oriented solution and the community as a whole particularly the elite athletes but also the sponsors the race directors the magazines and the media outlets all of those vested entities need to take an interest in this for the health and the longevity of the sport because if we don't we've seen what happens in other sports and we use the ufc we just use that i'll use that as a good example of they got their act together they got their shit together early enough within the

formation of that sport that this isn't an issue 10 years down from down the line ultra running has been alive for long enough that we are suspect and there's enough money coming into it that we are suspect to have those have those negative things have dopers come into the sport 10 years down the line we have to be looking towards the future in order to keep the sport healthy because trust me when charlie when you and i are old and gray and your kids are graduating high school and things like that and we look back on the sport and nothing was done and it ends up like cycling was in the 2000s and 2010 we're gonna kick ourselves for not doing anything they're absolutely right yep it's all about being preventative as opposed to being reactive um yeah man and and i like i want folks to think about what the collectives could be outside of testing too you know i mentioned to you at zane gray it was like you know what if we had a convention every year an alternate convention and we everybody got together and we all went for runs and you know drank some beers and hung out and had you know keynote speakers it could be a really cool thing it's like it's just stuff that it's cool stuff to think about as long as those conventions are 90 running and like 10 policy bs i'd be down for it all right man we're gonna leave it there i i can't tell you charlie how much i appreciate you you coming on the podcast and explaining all this i know that it was a huge part of your life a few years ago and one that did not come with a lot a lot of like angst and a few premature gray gray

hairs coming along but trust me man i've got faith something is gonna come of this and it's gonna be something that like i said 10 or 15 years from now we're gonna look back you're gonna and you are gonna look back specifically and say i was a big part of getting this started it might have finished underneath a different you know group of people or a different person or different management or whatever but that's something cool to say whenever you can leave a legacy that lasts for a long time and perhaps forever i always think that that's a real cool thing and you you trust me man mark by word you're going to be able to to do that once this is all said and done all right we'll see well i appreciate you having this discussion and you know it's really cool to talk about something that most folks don't want to talk about i know i don't even want to talk about it anymore so i appreciate you bringing me on and we're having this conversation yeah man we'll keep pushing it man always looking forward never back right all right thanks jason bye charlie all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to charlie for coming on the podcast today thank you for all the previous efforts we are indebted to this initial seed that you have planted that will hopefully grow into a big strong group of redwood trees or whatever other ecosystem we can kind of come up with um one of the things that i want to point out that we touched on in the podcast is these solutions are going to require effort as much as we like to hashtag clean sport and sign

pledges and put tattoos on our arms and things like that and as admirable as those uh endeavors are those are not real solutions real solutions are policies and procedures and rules that people actually have to abide by and when they don't there are consequences to those coming up with that rules framework is not an easy task and it's not going to be done overnight but we have to start somewhere and somebody like charlie we should all hold in high regard because he has started somewhere so let me know what you think about this particular episode you guys can hit me up on social media it's Jason Koop coop with a k across twitter and on instagram let's keep the conversation going folks as always we will see you out on the trails you